Activities

Through art, the intention of this program is to create collective spaces for critical reflection on the current complex geopolitical scenario, as well as to support Palestinian artists and curators in connecting their struggles and experiences with international solidarity networks.

El programa Documentos está dedicado a las relaciones entre el arte y la actividad editorial, abordando temas como los efectos del archivo en las narraciones de la historia del arte, el libro de artista o la edición como práctica artística. Esta entrega está dedicada al trabajo de Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), autora fundamental en la evolución del cómic underground norteamericano de finales del siglo XX, que participa en un encuentro con Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz y Camille Vannier.

Durante los años 2022 y 2023, en colaboración con el equipo de Museo en Red (hoy renombrado Museo Tentacular), La Laboratoria participó en el Nodo crítico Investigaciones Militantes de Tejidos conjuntivos, el Programa de Estudios Propios del Museo Reina Sofía. Simultáneamente impulsó y acompañó una serie de estancias donde distintos colectivos, investigador+s y artist+s problematizaron cuestiones muy diversas enfocadas desde la investigación militante como una práctica política que genera conocimiento colectivo. En la tela de araña es un programa de dos jornadas, que incluyen varias conversaciones y una pieza escénica, a modo de culminación de este proceso de investigación y creación.

Ghanaian artist, curator and cultural manager Ibrahim Mahama gives a lecture in the Museo, running through his professional career and exploring the continuities between academic research, artistic creation and current curatorial strategies to reconsider the transformative role of art from the Global South. The lecture is part of the Curatorial Practices Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue.

This encounter sets forth a journey through the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The tour, conducted by curator Manuel Borja-Villel, punctuates aspects that make Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) a key artist for the present and culminates in a poetry recital — selected and read by Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann and Victoria Pradilla — on the relationships between the Catalan artist and poetic writing. 

Queer. L.E. The Second Queer Literature Encounter encompasses a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives from different angles and perspectives in literature, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. 

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

This encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. The texts, gathered in the volume Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024], edited by Aurora Carmenate Díaz, are the pretext for celebrating the forms of making and the networks Díaz Bringas wove throughout her life.

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

This encounter sees choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972), alongside Lola Hinojosa, expand her reading of Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war dance piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and the point of reference for the exhibition Reconstrucción de una danza macabra (Reconstruction of a Macabre Dance), a new stage production framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fissures programme. The encounter will be followed by the unveiling of the show.

This encounter, in conjunction with the exhibition What They Saw. Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, curated by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, seeks to reflect on the female gaze and the photobook, an artistic medium which has come to the fore in recent years, despite historiography and exhibitions continuing to favour male authorship. The activity comprises a conversation between the publisher Sonia Berger and the aforementioned editor Russet Lederman, followed by an intervention from the photographers Liza Ambrossio, Manuela Lorente and Lúa Ribeira.

The medium-length documentary Serigne vs the EU (2022) tells the story of Serigne Mbayé: a migrant fisherman who uses his own life experiences to shed light on Europe’s abusive fishing policies in African waters and the fight against institutional xenophobia before political leaders at the heart of the European Union. 

Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network, Archives of the Commons is a bi-annual encounter which arises from the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces where memories gestate and are cared for. The aim is to open up opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as sounding out experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, exercises of imagination and critique which are key to articulating and constructing narratives of memory in resistance.

Film-maker and activist Philip Rizk looks over the key junctures in his artistic and personal trajectory, via an encounter and a workshop, to reflect on how the moving image weaves affective communities and collective forms of utterance. Rizk experiments with different techniques in his films that range from performance or the limits between fiction and documentary to the found footage montage, with a view to making the habitual strange and posing the question: How do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?

This thirtieth edition of Situated Voices addresses the housing problem via the neighbourhood collectives GRIGRI and Lavapiés, ¿dónde vas?, along with Museo Situado. With its gaze fixed on the nearby Lavapiés neighbourhood and in connection with other areas and territories, a conversation is set out from a place of urgency and around collective alternatives to the current predatory and individualistic real estate model.