Activities

When you hear the word “library”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Books? Full shelves? Study? Complete silence? This architecture workshop invites people to discover the nature of the Museo Reina Sofía Library, the history of its construction and the use of its space while passing through. What’s it like inside? What happens if it is explored with a set objective or from another perspective? No doubt there will be unexpected discoveries!

This spring, different forms of reading, writing practices and literature gain prominence in the Museo with a second Temporary Intensity Zone (TIZ) opening under the title, aligned with the ideas of poet and historian Ángel González, Escribir sin tener ni idea (Writing With No Idea). This programme looks to explore how words, narrative, can expand beyond literature and towards new territories of artistic creation and reflection of thought in the contemporary world.

These sessions set out from the idea that a feminism with the will for transformation must prioritise the most oppressed and violated needs, giving precedence to those who sustain the reproduction of life with their work. A feminism that is truly transformative must place the material conditions of existence at the centre and be able to build syndicalism based on stable networks of mutual support, politicising individual problems and allowing struggles to connect, and at the same time intersecting racial, gender and class oppression.

Over the past six years, the Southern Conceptualisms Network and Museo Reina Sofía have joined forces to arrange this periodic encounter, which stems from the common sentiment of the need to urgently strike up a dialogue between spaces where memory gestates. This fourth edition, under the title Archives to Come, calls upon imaginative powers underlying archive practices and thought and the way in which they are capable of proposing alterations to the dominant temporalities limiting the construction of other chronologies, the seed of different futures.  

March 8 has become a symbol of protest that flows beyond this date to solidify synergies and feminist, historical and present struggles. For over a century now, this day has condensed and amplified a first basic premise: rights for all women always, every single day. From numerous corners, from the past and the present, we aspire to many more 8Ms — every single day. In this way, this program started in February will be extended until June. 

This creative workshop, conducted by illustrator Enrique Flores, revolves around the concept of “illustrated journalism”, a way of narrating the present from illustration. It has been set up to carry out a sketched chronicle of daily life inside the Museo, conceiving it as a living institution which is permeable to the city and with myriad activities that stretch beyond regular visits.

In conjunction with the exhibition Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso. 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars (29 October 2021 – 6 March 2022), the Museo Reina Sofía organises a film-making workshop centred around colonial geographies and histories and directed by film-makers and artists Kidlat Tahimik (Philippines, 1942) and Sally Gutiérrez Dewar (Spain, 1965). 

Museo Situado organises the School of Rights, coordinated by Red Interlavapiés (the Interlavapiés Network) in order to build a collective space of information, advice and community legal support to deal with the rights violations migrant people face on a daily basis.

The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms is a programme on methodologies, tools and techniques in artistic practice. In its fourth edition, Teresa Lanceta conveys, via an online public lecture, the learning attained in her explorations of the rhombus. Based on her reflections, she will conduct a workshop whereby each participant can share and set up a dialogue with ‘their own form’, which stems either from their work or any other meaningful sphere in their life.   

For Moroccan artist Safaa Erruas (Tetouan, 1976) the act of weaving opens up a rethinking of the history underlying all women: the history of our bodies, our lived experiences, our travels, materialising and entwining with the histories of other people who simultaneously weave the same cloth. This workshop is geared towards the collective production of a textile piece which, in contrast to traditional weaving, comprises objects and elements from our daily lives. 

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.

At the confluence of art and activism, this workshop looks to cast a critical gaze on the representation of bodies, sexuality and gender in a clear confrontation with restrictions imposed by society, laws and religions. Over the course of three three-hour sessions in the company of illustrator and activist Zainab Fasiki, participants will collectively produce a fanzine.

Learning to make figures with string initiates experimentation with knots and weaves that interrelate the body, memory and language; figures that can also be taken apart to be started again in another way. Creating string figures thus interweaves moments of viewing, listening, conversing — for instance, about minimal existences — and pausing.

In the Meantime seeks to offer diverse possibilities for thinking about and placing context around the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 show, organised inside a framework of cultural cooperation between Spain and Morocco in the sphere of Museums and promoted by the National Foundation of Museums from the Kingdom of Morocco and the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, in collaboration with Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

Gestural Apparatuses and Echoic Landscapes is a workshop which approaches the revolt of the “singular guerrilla” composed in Fernand Deligny’s endeavours in Cévennes National Park, France, between 1969 and 1996.