Activities

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.

Dance, movement, transit, collision, self-perception and the eroticism of dancing are actions with the capacity to shake the system of power and, therefore, make up cuir actions. In Moving Cuirness, dynamics are put forward which are based on experiential anatomy through movement, sensorial exploration from being (in)touch, and rhythm; dynamics that work as triggers to generate, from the intimacy of present uniqueness, a collective dance where pleasure and freedom of movement take centre stage.

Architecture and medicine have always been closely linked. Theories about body and mind traverse architectural discourse, turning the figure of the architect into a kind of doctor, the client into a patient. Every era has its different conditions, each one requiring its own architecture.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites Alexandra T. Vázquez, an associate professor of NYU’s Institute of Performing Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts, to participate in its programme of master lectures. The programme for this edition includes a seminar and a lecture concerning music’s relationship with different experiences, objects and spaces, and also the methods, modes and approaches around what we feel we know about the visual.

This open day sees members of the Queer Malaise study group — developed in the Museo across September and October 2022 — share with those in attendance their experience-based and carnal, as well as intellectual and creative, exploration in the preceding weeks.

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía participates for the first time in Spanish Film Day, an initiative of Spain’s Ministry of Culture which brings together screens and programmes from different institutions. In this edition, we retrieve a historical and pioneering work in international experimental film: ...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren...(1968–1970), made by artist José Antonio Sistiaga (San Sebastián, 1932). 

Twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige, this Temporary Intensity Zone calls upon the collective potential of a self-organised citizenry facing the life-threatening side of environmental disaster.

This fresh edition of the Free Unions programme invites Guatemalan artist Benvenuto Chavajay to carry out the performance Returning Souls (Popol Vuh [Wuj]). With the aim of activating memory to translate and transcribe the silence of his ancestors, Chavajay looks to “make Guatemala’s soul return by means of the healing and dignifying role of art, thereby bringing justice to history,” in his words.

This seminar reflects on how performative artistic practices are inserted inside a collection and its institutional framework. To spark this debate, an approach is set forth from different perspectives — theory, practice and ethics — convening voices from inside and outside the museum as an institution. A series of lectures and events with different artists, theorists, curators and researchers brings together different viewpoints and reflections around working conditions with performative works of art.

The Museo Reina Sofía continues with its annual welcomes toTime has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

Violence pervades queer people, who constantly face barriers to social structures which hinder and constrain the development of subjectivity and the free expression of affections and desires. In an era of widespread malaise, this vulnerability intensifies, often leading to a downward spiral of solitude, pathologisation and victimisation that is hard to evade. Queer Malaise seeks to share and politicise these situations, which isolate people and single them out, through tools that include dialogue, narration, make-up, performance and the collective production of images.

The Museo Reina Sofía and Cineteca Madrid jointly organise the second part, and conclusion, of the retrospective devoted to the films of Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) with the international premiere of one of contemporary cinema’s most ambitious projects: the production of eleven feature-length films made by the director between 2021 and 2022.

This TIZ reflects on ghostly relationships, the relationships of events with history, of citizens with politics, of inhabitants with the home or of the missing with those still waiting for them. In the month of the dead, we think about mourning and lamenting, memory and forgetting, and forms of presence and disappearance from the unique spectrality which the same idea of a museum imposes upon us.

As another summer comes around, the Museo moves its cinema outside and into the Sabatini Building. This fresh edition is centred on musical films, viewed at once as a genre which is both playful and high-spirited and also a discourse which incorporates striking ruptures in formats and narratives.    

Cerdas (Sows) depicts the problems and consequences that materialise when body worship fails. By way of a series of scenes and seemingly unconnected “re-performances”, Carlos García de la Vega, Rodrigo García Marina and Rocío Simón show the violence inherent in certain regulated spaces that prevent queer corporality.

French-Argentinian artist Alejandra Riera conducts, alongside artists Caroline Déodat, Andreas-Maria Fohr and Antonio Menchen, a workshop in different spaces of the Museo, setting out from notions which form the backbone of her and the participating artists’ work: communal art-making, the fragility of materials and themes and film as an open process.

The Chair of Situated Thought sets out to articulate different experiences, stances, methods and initiatives of critical thought as it seeks to underscore the singularities of an intellectual and artistic production that converses with social and political circumstances, and which aspires to have an impact on the specific conditions of its environment.

This day of lectures and encounters, the fourth instalment of the series organised by the inter-university group TURICOM, endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. By virtue of a selection of brief lectures and a final conversation, followed by a debate, it looks to reflect on mass tourism and the way in which, as the industry of experience, it is connected to the search for a lived experience that has shaped contemporary art.

This latest edition of Situated Voices features the screening of the documentary El delito de existir (The Crime of Existing, 2022), followed by a conversation on the protagonists’ experience after arriving in Spain. These participants include: Fabiola Barranco (a journalist specialised in migration and human rights), Cristina Bermejo (director of ONG Rescate) and three LGTBIQ+ refugees living in Spain: Alex, one of the documentary’s protagonists, Fabu and Ramtin Zigorat, the session’s moderator.

This fourth edition, concerning the relationship between coloniality and gender, tries to reflect on certain feminist approaches which manifest a posture of moral, authoritaria and exclusivist superiority, characteristics of the patriarchal episteme. This programme, in charge of Rita Segato and Elisa Fuenzalida — the director and coordinator of the Chair, respectively —, includes a seminar in which local transfeminist activists participate.

Harvest 2022 sets out to debate and reflect upon the editing and production of photobooks, inviting anyone immersed in the lay-out stage of a project to share their photographic work with the other participants.   

Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This edition activates Room 104.06. Luis Camnitzer: Puerto Montt Massacre, 1969 and Room 104.07. A Map Is Not a Place. Via performers Teresa Ralli and Jorge Tadeo Baldeón, from Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, active since 1971 in Peru, fragments of the collective’s artistic repertoire are set in relation to the memories formalised by other artists who have confronted similar political or social situations.

This second edition presents the artistic and political pathway taken by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, founded in Peru in 1971, and highlights some of the key moments in their long history to spark debates that remain present in Peruvian and Latin American cultural contexts, and in Spanish and European spheres.

For the sixth year running, the Archipelago concert series invites the public to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening. This year, certain material questions are addressed which influence musical mutations, with the aim of providing a recap of what is learned on the common history of tradition and contemporary culture to reinterpret and update this discourse through forced migration, the transport of wood, metals and minerals and the importance of ports and old maritime routes in our listening.   

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forced migration of millions of people, particularly women and girls, has once again become a pressing issue that reignites the debate around human trafficking and the situations that cause it. This edition of Situated Voices looks to reflect on the different problems people being trafficked face, exploring the causes and consequences and stressing the urgent need to create public policies to support and protect them.

The Neighbourhood Picnic constitutes an annual opportunity to create a space where Lavapiés (Madrid) residents can come together in the Museo’s Garden. A place for everyone and part of the daily life of the neighbourhood in which it is situated.  

On this occasion, experimental duo Los Voluble put forward an audiovisual and sound exploration which reflects on 1992 and its implications in the cultural, social and political sphere of the country, drawing from archive material, electronic music and live cinema.

This programme, coinciding with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride, does not look to “thematise” a pathological situation. Rather, it sets out to demonstrate the power of admitting we ourselves are fragile and vulnerable, together with other lives shaken by persecution and exile. Nor does it seek to moralise on the positions and practices outside the norm, vindicating a greater capacity for agency of and over our bodies and sexual impulses, developed here through plastic, poetic, written and performative devices. 

Slumil K’ajxemk’op — which means “rebel land” in Tzotzil, a Mayan dialect — is how the Zapatista delegation renamed Europe during its visit to the continent in 2021. A gift for being aware of and recognising ourselves as part of another Europe “abducted” from itself, and which invites us to reinvent our ties to the past in an emancipatory mode of expression, to the point of returning our otherness to us: the non-suppressed condition.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986.

This seventh edition of Graphic Outbreak witnesses Delight Lab, in collaboration with Vórtice Creativo CIMA, seeking to create a space of reflection to collectively build slogans that can be projected in public space using the video mapping technique and which help to stress social problems such as health exclusion in the Spanish State. Following the passing of Royal Decree-Law 16/2012, of 20 April, access to the National Health System (SNS) in Spain is linked to people’s administrative situation, making it increasingly less accessible and universal. Above all, this situation afflicts undocumented migrant people, who experience long waits and unpayable bills, putting their life at risk.

Graphic Outbreak 6. O Corpo como Poética da Luta is a workshop organised by Coletivo Alvorada and shines a light on the body, flash mobs and textiles as strategies to burst into public space.

Algorithms is an evening of music based on a set of mathematical instructions describing the homonym concept. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía offers a session of guided listening with two pieces for piano by Iannis Xenakis: Herma (1961) and Evryali (1973), performed by Magdalena Cerezo Falces. To make Xenakis’s method of mathematical composition legible, the performer is joined by musicologist and educator Marina Hervás and artist Marta Verdem, whose visuals are designed specifically for the event. This will be followed by Xenakis’s piece La légende d’eer (1977-1978) performed by musician Sergio Luque, with the collaboration of Juan Carlos Blancas. 

On this occasion, work is carried out specifically with the campaign #ESenciales* #RegularizacionYa (#ESsential* #RegularisationNow), which fights to obtain the extraordinary regularisation of 500,000 people in an irregular administrative situation and who cannot exercise their rights in the Spanish State.

This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties. 

The Museo Reina Sofía once again celebrates International Museum Day. This year the slogan put forward by ICOM is “The Power of Museums” to highlight the potential of cultural institutions in our societies.

Bioliteratures 1 is conceived as a series of sessions in which writing forms converge around authors whose careers defy distances between subject and language, between the self and us, between the public and the private. For this first session, made up of two round-table discussions, the literary work of Rafael Chirbes, which speaks to us of disarticulated and violent nature intrinsically constituting our times, has been selected.

Four decades on from the Rompente collective’s disbandment, this encounter is organised to reflect and work upon the historical significance of this community of artists, poets, musicians and likeminded figures, and upon the collective’s memory, forms of artistic production and political by-products.

Neighbourhood memories belong to the inhabitants — their situated experiences, relationships, celebrations, conflicts and traumas — the spaces they occupy, mutual support networks and struggles to improve both their lives and their environment.