Activities

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.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, the encounter Chile or Utopian Imagination: On Democracy as Aesthetics examines, across two days, the Andean country’s cultural practices developed today from memories of the dictatorship.

This instalment centres on the work of draughtsman and cartoonist Chris Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 1967), one of the pre-eminent names in independent comics. Ware will also take part in a conversation and encounter with Carla Berrocal, Enrique Bordes and Raquel Jimeno.

Following the tide that swept through the streets during the 8M Strikes in 2018 and 2019, linked to the resurgence of a feminist internationalism, in April 2019 a hundred or so people gathered in a space in Madrid to debate the situation facing the movement. A year later, the conversation continued in Barcelona, with double the number of participants. Both encounters set out the need to delve deeper into new feminist debates from a non-identity, inclusive and diverse perspective, forming the grounds for the publication Alianzas rebeldes [Rebel Alliances] (Bellaterra, 2021).

This conference revises the present and past of aerial war by way of three case studies conducted by researchers and creators linked to history, photography, architecture and medicine.

Alice Centamore y Christian Xatrec, comisarios de la exposición Llámalo de otra manera. Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974), proponen un recorrido por la muestra con el objetivo de acercarse a las prácticas artísticas que la editorial Something Else Press contribuyó a difundir en las décadas de 1960 y 1970: nuevas formas de creación que estuvieron basadas en el tiempo, el azar y el agenciamiento del público, como las de Fluxus y el arte conceptual.