Activities

This fresh edition shows the national premiere of Man in Black (2023) by Wang Bing (China, 1967), a documentary feature film on memory, truth and the power of music from the biography of composer Wang Xilin (China, 1936). The director will also present the film and participate in the conversation that follows the screening.

Developed by Fundación Gabeiras, Legacies. Spaces to Preserve Contemporary Creations is a project which seeks to analyse the situation of artistic legacies in the Spanish State from a social and legal perspective. It comes into being with the aim of drawing up a legal report to put forward solutions to a widespread problem of neglect in a state-wide context: the precarity of senior artists and safeguarding their contemporary legacies.

En el marco de la exposición maquinaciones, se lleva a cabo en el Museo un taller de sastrería en colaboración con agentes locales y un acto público de presentación del proyecto en el que se muestra algunas piezas confeccionadas en Trieste. Ambas actividades ahondan en la potencia de la cooperativa como máquina de reproducción social y sostén de la vida en común, a partir de la alianza entre colectivos que luchan por sus derechos.

Chile or Utopian Imagination is a programme of activities which gathers film, textile and community art, critical thought and poetry to explore memory in relation to the project of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government, the coup d’état and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile by way of the work of different artists and thinkers.

This session, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets out to explore the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. The activity looks to reflect on the difficulty, and urgency, of imagining a world after, or beyond, tourism, with the programme comprising a compendium of brief lectures and a subsequent presentation of specific case studies by architecture and urbanism teams involved in re-wilding environments affected by tourism exploitation.

This workshop, drawing from the machinations exhibition, creates and improves Wikipedia entries related to the show’s focal points — War Machines, Schizo Machines, Cinema Machines of Care — and some of the concepts related to works by the artists involved: the crisis of representation, micropolitics, deep ecology, social machines and cyborgs, among others.

This round-table discussion features the participation of Ballet Djédje, Demetrio Gómez, Elena Prous, Tatiana Romero Reina and Iki Yos Piña, the voices of different agents hit hard by the logics of hate and fear and who refuse to assume the role of victim that pushes them aside and threatens to absorb the energy and capacity to evolve and build other ways of relating. 

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre organise, in collaboration with PhotoBook Club Madrid, Harvest, an annual public encounter which presents photobook mock-ups and is open to creators of every stripe. Photobooks have now become one of the biggest vehicles of expression for contemporary photographic creation, with Harvest 2023 an encounter which looks to gauge and share current activity in this field.

This fresh edition of the LGBTIAQ+ programme looks to explore the possibility of imaginatively and politically turning around the logics of hate and fear that run through us, socially raising questions around who personifies a non-normative sex-gender or body position.

The Museo’s Study Centre organises two public sessions based on the first edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Programme of Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, the team of mobilisers share the works developed up to this point and reflect on their predictions. Equally, the group of Resident Student Researchers present their work on posters and in installations and talks with people interested.

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges. This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience.

On 24 June 2022, at least forty people lost their lives on the border between Melilla and Morocco. Situated Voices 29 brings that dire event into focus without forgetting the preceding occurrences and the systemic violence which is still happening relentlessly at borders. The encounter seeks to foreground the voices of those people who escape suffering, injustice and cruelty, of lives on the brink, those who are politically and/or physically isolated outside European territory and are often forced to return to everything they escaped from.

In its fifth edition, the Neighbourhood Picnic transforms, once again, the Museo Reina Sofía, turning it into a space of encounter, enjoyment and resistance for all residents of Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.

Opposite the capitalist concept of the city as a financial centre or tourist park built for consumerism, Situated Voices 28 seeks to articulate the foundations, from collectiveness, to reformulate concepts of property and belonging in relation to public space. In looking for the answers to these questions, this encounter is set out as a space for sharing experiences, tools and neighbourhood actions which search for channels of collective transformation.

Utopias and Revolts. Composing Strategies from the Collective is a series of encounters which, from a public round table and different work sessions, reflects upon strategies to deal with present-day challenges related to eco-social crises and sustaining life. 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.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía, alongside the Wikimedia España Association, seeks to incorporate Wikipedia’s philosophy of shared knowledge into different modes of making and rethinking the museum. Within the framework of this collaboration, the publishing workshop The History of the Lavapiés Neighbourhood on Wikipedia is organised with a collaborative network of neighbourhood collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés area.

The Territorial Re-existences Lab is an encounter which, with Colombian researchers and activists Lavinia Fiori and Libia Grueso, and presented by Carmen Haro and moderated by Josimar Castillo and Elisa Fuenzalida from Redes por el clima (Networks for Climate), aims to pool the strategic visions, conceptual tools and narratives to deal with the climate crisis.

Situated outside academic frameworks, these investigations pick up the legacy of workers’ co-research from the 1960s, feminist epistemologies and theories of research-action. Therefore, more than establishing a method, they seek to generate devices in order for social struggles to read each other and find causes that lead to action. 

This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.

In conjunction with the exhibition Margarita Azurdia. Margarita Rita Rica Dinamita, this encounter explores the Central American artist Margarita Azurdia’s (Guatemala, 1931–1988). The encounter in the Museo comprises a tour through the exhibition, led by its coordinator Beatriz Jordana, interweaving voices and echoes superimposed in the different rooms of the show, a selection of the artist’s poems chosen by the show’s curator.

Queer L.E. The First Queer Literature Encounter is a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. The sessions are articulated from different places such as prose, research and critical thinking, a juncture for words to transcend books and reach bodies around a community of readers, activists, writers and LGTBIAQ+ people.

This TIZ addresses the problem areas that approach ecology from relationality. Interactions, relations of intimacy and mutual support, forms of collective intelligence, shared knowledge, involvement in protesting against climate change and community learning are some of the concepts that define the activities, activations, investigations and accompaniments from April through to July in the Museo.

Inside the Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023 programme, and in one unique session, Guernica: el último exiliado (Guernica: The Last Exile) is screened, a documentary film centred on the iconic mural’s arrival in Spain seven months after the coup d’état attempt in 1981. In this instance, it is presented by its director, Guillermo Logar, and features a conversation with Genoveva Tussell and Álvaro Martínez-Novillo.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

In recent months, citizen demonstrations have exposed the dismal situation felt, for a number of years now, in the rooms of hospitals and medical centres across the Spanish State: public healthcare is in danger. Its clear demise, resulting from the progressive neglect of the country’s public authorities since the economic crisis in 2008, has intensified since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately damaging the pillars of a public model recognised the world over.

In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.

In conjunction with 8M, the Museo organises a transversal programme with a focus on feminisms which, intersected by new present-day demands — the right to health and housing, climate justice — continue to call out different forms of violence that persist in today’s society as they interweave complicities and affection to make new horizons possible.

This conversation, open to the public, explores the tradition of literary analysis from a social perspective in a Hispanic context, welcoming three speakers and a moderator from university institutions and the sphere of publishing to discuss this key book in the tradition of Spanish literature.

This new edition of Documents recovers the work of female cartoonists such as Montse Clavé, Ana Miralles, Núria Pompeia and Mariel Soria, and serves as a prelude to a document-based show on the same theme, to be held in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre in 2023. 

This encounter, conducted by Sara Buraya, coordinator of Museo en Red in the Museo, and activist Rafaela Pimentel, brings together activist women over mental health as they reflect on these issues from their own experiences.

Since December 2022, via the programme Perturbable School II, seminars on political violence and institutions, the work of Margarita Azurdia, and other situated voices, this Temporary Intensity Zone raises questions around the illness and healing of the institutions that shape us and the bodies with which we traverse and make them.

The programme Free Unions is structured around a series of events, surveys and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This particular edition activates Room 103.11 devoted to artist Rosa Barba and her work Bending to Earth (2015), a 35mm film installation which explores nuclear waste and the way in which it radically transforms the landscape

This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.

A framework that encompasses successive crises which shape the present sociopolitical context and consequences that start to become embedded — constant price hikes, high temperature warnings, a dearth of resources, new and ever-closer military interventions — raises questions over the exact crisis we are facing. And if the current model is exhausted, what is our future?

The sinking of the Prestige in 2002 demonstrated how the majority of contemporary environmental disasters give rise to significant mobilisations of mutual aid and demands in the places where they occur. In this four-day encounter, different researchers, artists, activists and citizens reflect on the relations between ecology, memory and democracy today. The programme revolves around four axes: environmental traditions stretching from the anti-Francoist struggle to the present; memory and citizen creativity following the Prestige oil spill; authoritarian threats that loom from the depletion of fossil fuels; and controversies around imaginable futures.

The Museo organises Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, a double programme which is part of the 40^th Autumn Festival of Madrid. The first part features the performance of Monument 0.6: Heterochrony, a stage piece by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon, who creates an imaginary scene between past and present.

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning is the title under which a set of activities are set in motion around the echo of activities celebrating All Souls Day with a programme of live arts, before continuing with a study group under the same name. It seeks to open up a dialogue around mourning as a human process of loss and mourning established by the world through reflections from artistic forms of expression, social movements and environmental activism.

From different areas of society — particularly in relation to women and feminist movements — there is a demand for every political, economic and social stratum to embark upon a transition towards truly and effectively establishing an equal society. Moderated by Ángeles González-Sinde, this round-table discussion seeks to explore these issues in greater depth via the experience of three leading figures who, through their work, approach gender equality in culture from different viewpoints.

Three years on from its first edition, the Second International Feminist Encounter on the Witch-hunt. Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence Against Women continues by retrieving the memory of women accused of being witches and hounded and murdered in the Early Modern Period, and analysing mechanisms used for such purposes which persist today.

Inside the framework of Madrid Otra Mirada (Another View of Madrid), the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre Department and its Architecture, Sustainable Development and General Services Area put forward two events which look to approach and delve deeper into knowledge around the institution’s rich cultural heritage.

The Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter devoted to inclusive education understood as a process of learning and co-existence. The session begins with the premiere of the documentary Quererla es crearla (To Want Is to Create, 2022), by Cecilia Barriga, and continues with a debate on the transformations inclusive education can bring about in the context of museums and their teaching programmes.

This activity looks to bring the audience closer to the different performance pieces by approaching research fields which explore the different projects. Thus, it constitutes a common learning space in the form of a conversation between speakers in collaboration with the artists participating in this fourth edition. Set out around three conversations, the encounter prompts a reflection, questions and shared references as well as detecting and revealing common interests, connections and potential.

Under the title Second Skin. Subcutaneous, this latest edition approaches people’s relationship with the world through the skin, understood both in the literal sense, the integumentary system which covers the body of vertebrate animals, and figuratively, the layer or layers of experiences, affection, knowledge, tradition or bodily techniques determining appearance and relationships.