Activities

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 exhibition Machinations traces the influence of the machine concept developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in contemporary art within the context following May ’68 in France. Pivotal to putting together the show has been the research work of a scientific committee made up of philosophers Gerald Raunig and Stevphen Shukaitis and cultural theorist Brigitta Kuster. In this round-table discussion, moderated by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, each guest will present their research. 

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.

El Hierro is not any volcanic island. For centuries, it was considered prime meridian before being replaced by Greenwich Mean Time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. This occurred after the United Kingdom had standardised the measurement of time for the rest of the planet in 1840 via the Great Western Railway company. El Hierro, sitting halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents Western media’s powerful grid, which rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.

In her recent publications, art historian and curator Antonia Majaca has focused her research on the relations between the development of algorithmic computing regimes and their potential to build subjectivity. This lecture sees Majaca analyse the historical construction of optical regimes found at the root of Western cosmologies in studies on how the history of Western geology has been shaped, considering that such regimes of the gaze are found at the base of contemporary computational paradigms.

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.

Museo Situado organises, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía’s Conservation and Restoration and Artwork Registration Departments, a new edition of the Course on Handling, Packing, Transporting and Installing Cultural Heritage Artefacts. The aim is to give people with migrant life stories from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood some insight into how artworks are handled and exhibitions are installed.

This lecture by Enzo Traverso pivots around his latest book Revolution. An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021) in which he addresses the genealogy of the “revolution” concept and its multiple uses, giving rise to dialectic constellations from intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Aleksandra Kolontái and Auguste Blanqui and exploring the connection between their lines of theory and the existential realities they were developed within, and without averting the gaze from the aesthetic expressions that emerged in parallel with these revolutions, in addition to their relationship with time, oscillating incessantly between past and future, memory and utopia.

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.

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Bachelor’s Degree in Art at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum.

In this lecture, Equatoguinean writer, intellectual and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo traces a literary journey on the history of Equatorial Guinea, from the era of Spanish colonisation to its independence and subsequent evolution towards an authoritarian regime and its experience of diaspora.

This edition of Documents surveys the lesser-examined side of Pablo Picasso: as a poet. The visual, sound and performance quality of his poetry is deepened in the dialogue between text, sound and image, elements that form the backbone of the activity, structured around a performance recital of a selection of poems — with a new Spanish translation by Jèssica Jaques Pi — followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an editor and expert in Picasso’s literary work, and members of the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The Indonesian art collective Taring Padi organises the workshop Activating Resistance with wayang kardus with a view to sharing one of its most distinctive artistic and political unrest techniques: the creation of wayang kardus, recycled cardboard puppets inspired by the rod and shadow puppets characteristic of traditional Indonesian theatre.

Italian artists Yervant Gianikian (Merano, 1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Rome, 1942–2018) are both pivotal figures in avant-garde cinema, their work centred on films and filmic, compilation-based installations which explore the twentieth-century’s major wars and the ideologies that occasion them. This programme is a retrospective with the catastrophe of war as its fulcrum and includes the international premiere of the artists’ last film Frente a Guernica (In Front of Guernica, 2023).

Joseph Morder (Trinidad and Tobago, 1949) is a film-maker and diarist whose Super-8 films are a monument to experimentation and film as a way of life. This programme, comprising three, single-screening sessions, unveils three of his films on the city of Madrid and its people, neighbourhoods, history and lives: Niños, niñas (Malasaña) (Boys, Girls [Malasaña], 1978), L’Été madrilène (The Madrid Summer, 1978) and La Gran Vía de Rita Jones (The Gran Vía of Rita Jones, 1996). The film-maker will be in attendance at all three screenings.

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.

With the aim of strengthening the use of the platform and making its holdings more accessible to researchers and the general public alike, the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre organises a series of training sessions on LaDigitaldelReina, in which different uses of the platform in its different forms are presented — from the most accessible to the most restricted — to facilitate interactions with participants.

An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.

The first civilian casualties of the first documented aerial attacks since the invention of aviation were recorded in 1912. In her work Unending Lightning, artist Cristina Lucas employs an audiovisual device to locate on a map and trace all aerial bombings that have caused the loss of civilian lives from that year to the present. 

This lecture sees Patricia Saldarriaga set out the premise that although zombies can be considered representatives of otherness, they can also be seen as a result of necropolitics.

Diversity, art and music come together on this day of festivities and vindication, in which Radio 3 sets up in the Nouvel Building Courtyard to offer a line-up of artists who will perform live —streamed on the Radio 3 website — without interruption from 7am to 10pm. The day will conclude with upbeat music in the Sabatini Building Garden from 9pm to midnight.

In memory of Carlos Saura (1932–2023), this programme screens two films: Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk, 2022), the film-maker’s final work centred on artistic impulses that extend from pre-historic cave painting to contemporary graffiti, and Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry! 1980), one of Saura’s early films and a major landmark in his oeuvre.

Omona! is an event which hosts K-pop choreographies and examines thought around this global phenomenon. K-pop, meaning Korean pop, is ever-present the world over, the fine detail of its choreographies, its frenzied music videos and its ultra-mastered sound production some of the hallmarks of this revision of boy bands and girl groups. The encounter sees choreographer and art historian Natalia de Val put forward an analysis of this cultural movement, followed by an event in which assorted dance groups will perform covers of their favourite bands.

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.

This encounter pays tribute to Charlie Parker and Benny Harris’s classic Ornithology, and brings together two figures from Galicia who are both distinguished in their respective spheres: storyteller Quico Cadaval and jazz saxophonist Pablo Castaño.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid bring into focus Narimane Mari (Algeria, 1969) in this film series, which includes the international premiere of her latest film S'il etait une fois (If Once Upon a Time, 2023), three live music sessions, presentations of different films and a conversation with the artist and film-maker.

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.