Free Unions. Searching for a Place
Activities on the Collection
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration by filling out the following form until 10am on 15 June
Registration closed
45 minutes
Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This edition activates Room 104.06. Luis Camnitzer: Puerto Montt Massacre, 1969 and Room 104.07. A Map Is Not a Place. Via performers Teresa Ralli and Jorge Tadeo Baldeón, from Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, active since 1971 in Peru, fragments of the collective’s artistic repertoire are set in relation to the memories formalised by other artists who have confronted similar political or social situations.
Yuyachkani’s artistic work bears a close relation to social movements in Peru; that is, a collective mise en scène related to the theatricalities of traditional cultures, and from this place it enters into dialogue with world theatres, particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Their performative activation around the Collection seeks to “inhabit” certain spaces from discourses of the body and actions, bringing different presences that already exist in other histories and which, in conversing with the Museo, create other meanings and bring about relationships with those sharing the same space-time: the audience. In the group’s own words: “Yuyachkani, a Quechuan word meaning ‘I am thinking, I am remembering’, drives us to take on this active verb from the present. It invites us to reflect and feel, from multiple perspectives, our South American, colonial and at the same time contemporary, transgressive and response-full realities”.
The Free Unions programme is made up of different thematic strands, its title alluding to the poem Free Union (1931) by André Breton in its definition of psychic automatism as an alternative to rationalism. The transgressive spirit of that poem, which takes apart rational discourse through a lexical juxtaposition to generate other relationships and significations, governs this public programme, in which recitals, readings, debates, performances and actions in these rooms transgress the aura of the white cube.