Activities

The 25th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 7 and 8 March 2024. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

José Rodríguez Soltero (Santurce, 1943 – New York, 2009) was an experimental film-maker whose productions were made across the 1960s and 1970s. His audiovisual work stands at the intersection of the avant-garde, queer representations and Latin culture from that era (specifically, Nuyoricans: Puerto Ricans living in New York). This film series screens all three and features presentations by Juan A. Suárez, a specialist in North American underground cinema, Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and protagonist in Dialogue with Che, and MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of the three works.

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.

“To every age its art; to every art its freedom”, reads the inscription on the façade of the Vienna Succession Pavilion. The same ideal runs through the Jeonju International Film Festival (South Korea), which, for over twenty years, has charted the film-making of our time by means of independently made productions. This series, therefore, compiles a selection of such films, many of which have never been shown in Spain, for the purposes of sketching a global map of today’s auteur cinema.

The centrepiece of this new edition is Mamántula (2023), by Ion de Sosa (Urnieta, Gipuzkoa, 1981), a fictional feature-length film on the freedom of desire which blends psychosexual thriller, gay porn and science fiction. The screening includes a presentation and talk by the director in both sessions.

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. 

This edition turns its attentions towards cavities, both mental and physical, that open in our bodies after the passing-through of other bodies. As porous beings we live in constant relations and exchange with others, not only because we are social, or because we inhabit the planet — filled with other living beings — but because we are the planet. And its history. As part of this planet-being, the proposals in this edition of ESTUDIO take on a poetic responsibility, with Ola Maciejewska, Josu Bilbao and Paz Rojo assaying material forms that are poetic, physical and anatomical, and which entail passing through knowledge knowing that results are not guaranteed.

This activity presents a screening of the feature-length documentary Orlando, mi biografía política (Orlando. My Political Biography, 2023), by the philosopher and writer Paul B. Preciado, and features an intervention, in the second session, by the artist, writer and poet Roberta Marrero, the author of El bebé verde: infancia, transexualidad y héroes del pop (Lunwerg Editores, 2016) and Todo era por ser fuego. Poemas de chulos, trans y travestis (Continta me tienes, 2022).

This encounter screens the video installation Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para un tiempo trans (A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time, 2022), by artist duo Cabello/Carceller, a work recently acquired by the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. It also features a presentation by the writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, the author of the novel Las niñas del naranjel (The Girls from the Orange Grove, Penguin Random House, 2023) on Catalina/Antonio de Erauso.

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?

The lecture series Picasso 1906. The Turning Point is articulated around the same-titled exhibition held in the Museo from 15 November 2023 to 4 March 2024. The programme brings together eminent international specialists such as Eugenio Carmona, Cécile Debray, Tamar Garb, Jèssica Jaques Pi, Patricia Leighten and Robert Lubar, among others, with a view to surveying Picasso’s origins through a contemporary gaze.