TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies

The current situation of climate emergency necessitates not only a call for resistance, but also for listening to experiences of re-existence and the activation of past memories of collapse, plundering and extractivism. This activity, organised jointly with Redes por el clima (Networks for Climate) and coordinated by Josimar Castillo, Elisa Fuenzalida and Carmen Haro, puts forward an encounter of local agents with Colombian researchers and activists Lavinia Fiori and Libia Grueso, with the aim of sharing strategic visions in the fight against climate change, the result of prior participatory work by citizen laboratories, social agents and young activists, migrants, and members of the Black Communities Process (PCN) in Colombia.

Epiphyte is a project, nurtured by the cultural association Side Thinkers and directed by Vanesa Viloria, which investigates new forms of facing the eco-social crisis by observing the plant world as a way to learn of other ways of life, community and future. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Pollinating (Con)tact, a programme structured around two artistic proposals and two conversations with agents and professionals linked to environmental humanities, artistic creation, science and climate activism. Starting from the hybridisation of languages and disciplines, this activity seeks to move beyond the hegemony of academic language as a medium to transmit knowledge, shining a light on other narratives such as fiction and poetry and focusing on the senses.

This encounter pays tribute to Charlie Parker and Benny Harris’s classic Ornithology, bringing together storyteller Quico Cadaval and jazz saxophonist Pablo Castaño. Cadaval sculpts a freeform story, revealing the experiences and the curiosities of the life, myth and sound persona of Bird, Parker’s nickname, and placing them in dialogue with local music history. Castaño completes Cadaval’s narrations with his sax, reinterpreting musical landscapes of Ornithology and other bebop classics. In a collaboration, both artists set forth an experience comprising oral and musical improvisation with comic, poetic and ironic flourishes.

This encounter reflects upon strategies to deal with present-day challenges related to eco-social crises and sustaining life which cannot be reduced to environmental factors and must encompass financial, geopolitical, social and energy causes which run in parallel. Therefore, collectives and associations involved in social movements that include transfeminism, rights (domestic workers, housing, care, sexual rights), the struggles of migrant people, and other movements, are brought together here.

Sociología Ordinaria is a transdisciplinary research group that seeks to explore daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint, conducting its investigations and reflections from a relational and sensitive perspective. This eleventh edition of the Sociología Ordinaria Encounters sets out to address discomfort: its frameworks, meanings, sensations, impressions and feelings. By asking how it affects us, discomfort is approached as a political, affective, ethical and aesthetic position and situation, and as a methodological and epistemological stance.

This lecture sees Equatoguinean writer, intellectual and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo trace a literary journey on the history of Equatorial Guinea, from the era of Spanish colonisation to its independence and subsequent evolution towards and an authoritarian regime and the experience of diaspora. The encounter concludes with a conversation between Ndongo-Bidyogo and journalist and researcher Tania Safura Adam on the absence of public reflections on Black presence in Spain and the dilemmas of post-colonial literary creation.

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Arts Degree at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum. It constitutes a space which looks to contribute towards creating an expanded and connected student community of artists and researchers and is linked to the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre. The public programme starts with the presentation of a selection of six final degree works by students from the UOC’s aforementioned Arts Degree, opening a subsequent discussion to share processes, methodologies, questions and learnings related to artistic practice and reflection. This will be followed by a discussion with artist Clàudia Pagès and concludes with a workshop conducted by Patricia Esquivias and Matteo Locci.

The Neighbourhood Picnic is an initiative by the Museo Situado network rooted in the desire to recover the Sabatini Building Garden as a public space given the lack of green spaces for collective enjoyment in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood. By way of this annual offering, the Picnic becomes at once a political tool and a place of celebration inside the Museo. Under the theme Re-enchanting Lavapiés, which draws inspiration from the notion of “re-enchanting the world” put forward by feminist activist Silvia Federici — highlighting the need to drive forward alternative logics to capitalist development — the aim is to create other forms of resistance: actions for survival which connect us to nature, people and our bodies, allowing us to live full lives.

In his work, distinguished historian and intellectual Enzo Traverso explores the relationship between politics and violence in contemporary history from genealogies of Nazism and Europe’s civil wars. His relational understanding of history as a disputed territory confronts mutations of reactionary thought, summoning the legacy of modern critical traditions from an awareness of their crises. This lecture pivots around Traverso’s new book Revolution. An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021), in which he reflects on the historical imagination of revolution and our political relationships with time as experience and culture.

The 2023 edition brought down the curtain on a theoretical and geopolitical journey through the musical mutations of our times which was set in motion in 2017 by José Luis Espejo and then jointly with Rubén Coll from 2018 onwards. The island of El Hierro, halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents the Western media’s powerful grid, which in turn rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. In this final edition, El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.

Participants: The Folkloric Ensemble of Sabinosa, DJ Travella and DJ Diaki, Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, and Tenores di Bitti "Mialinu Pira".

The Museo’s Study Centre puts forward two public sessions based on the first edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme of Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, researchers from different Seminars and Critical Nodes share the work developed up to this point, as well as their future projections, while the group of Resident Student Researchers offers a snapshot of their final projects. These sessions are articulated from workshops and round-tables in which all attendees can participate.  

Collective Tissue is the Museo’s training programme for researchers which involves a framework made up of two device types — nine Seminars and eleven Critical Nodes — which put forward different road maps for discussion and academic innovation in key aspects of humanistic and artistic knowledge today, and are complemented with other public activities from the Study Centre. This programme, devised as something that “weaves the weaving of fibres” with its flexible nature and diverse specialisation, speaks to us of an interdependent, relational, situated, and multi-distributed understanding of the workings of a museum in the world and the research conducted within it.

Stephen Eisenman is an art historian, curator and activist whose work centres on animal rights and environmental causes, as well as the reform of the US prison system. Eisenman’s work also specialises in how the political and the aesthetic relate. His essays The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007) and The Cry of Nature. Art and the Making of Animal Rights (2013) form the starting point of this podcast, which zooms in on his most recent work: an intellectual undertaking in which the study of violence in art leads to the consideration of expanding the notion of rights for every sentient being, not just humans.