Mayrit 2026 reaches its fourth edition with a fundamental question: what happens when the models with which we organise the world begin to show their limitations? Under the theoretical framework of (Super) Models, the biennial unfolds between May 20 and 24 across fifteen venues, with two institutional exhibitions and fourteen independent projects, activating Madrid as a network of spaces, conversations and material experiments.
Miguel Leiro, director of Mayrit, summarises it as a clear shift from previous editions: the biennial “is no longer just a platform for showcasing emerging designers” and now operates as “a framework for understanding how the objects, spaces, images, and systems we inhabit are produced today”. In this transition, Mayrit gains curatorial depth without losing its local, city-wide reach. These are the three must-sees we selected from Connections by Finsa: an exhibition, a talk and a workshop.
1. Unboxing: When matter resists control
At the Matadero Design Centre, Unboxing, by Espace AYGO with Finsa, proposes a speculative reading of the life cycle of industrialised materials, with special attention to wood in board form. The installation starts from an almost primal image, that of sculptural entities emerging from inside the boxes that contain them. But this deployment is moving towards a less docile territory, where order, regulation and control lead to disintegration and chaos.
That’s where its interest lies, because Unboxing doesn’t see disorder as an accident, but as an internal condition of systems that try to optimise and contain matter. The piece speaks of entropy, but also of material agency; of that which remains latent even in the most calculated industrial processes. In Leiro’s words, the project proposes that “even within the most regulated systems, matter retains its own agency”.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
2. Lucas Muñoz: design, production and vermouth
On May 31, Infinito Delicias hosts “Acidic Conversation with Lucas Muñoz“, an informal meeting with the designer responsible for some of the furniture and lamps in the space. The meeting will take place at UNMAR, the building’s restaurant, in a deliberately relaxed format: listening, conversing and sharing a vermouth.
More than a typical talk, the meeting opens up the inner workings of a project, from how furniture is designed and produced for a real context, what material decisions are involved, and what it means to work from a sustainable perspective without turning it into a slogan. Muñoz will share the process developed at Infinito, from the furniture pieces to the two types of lamps present in the building.
In an edition focused on the models that order reality, this conversation grounds theory in practice, involving budgets, processes, waste, trades, uses and decisions that rarely appear in the final image of a space.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
3. Architectures as a rehearsal for other worlds
Also at Infinito Delicias, the workshop Architectures as a rehearsal for other worlds, with Elii and Husos Arquitectura, presents architecture as an open, situated and transforming practice. The workshop brings together neighbours, design agents and urban actors to work on collective uses, garden care, making invisible processes visible and the building’s relationship with the street.
The key is to understand Infinito Delicias as an open and incomplete ecosocial infrastructure. Instead of viewing architecture as a closed answer, the workshop proposes to activate questions: what models of coexistence does a building support, what material processes does it reveal or conceal, and how are its possible futures negotiated.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
As 3+1, Leiro points to another key exposure to read Mayrit 2026 in all its density: IBEX36. Material Culture = Global Value, by Saúl Baeza / DOES WORK, at the National Museum of Decorative Arts. If Unboxing, the conversation with Lucas Muñoz and the workshop by Elii and Husos Arquitectura address matter, process and space as disputed territories, IBEX36 expands the scale of the question by placing objects within the economic systems that run through them. The exhibition imagines the museum as a real-time stock exchange, where the pieces cease to appear only as heritage and are read from their material composition, their origin, their transport, the labour involved and their current economic value. A perfect ending to an edition that does not understand design as the production of forms, but rather as a tool to detect which models organise (and sometimes strain) our way of living.
