International Museum Day 2021

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre organise an encounter that gets under way with a guided tour around their facilities, showing the different services on offer to visitors and presenting a selection of different materials from their artistic holdings, materials used to document performance art. The ephemeral, fleeting and short-lived nature of performance actions means that faithfully recording them presents a challenge for artists, institutions and publishers alike. Therefore, this activity sets forth a reflection and debate on the recording and archiving of these formats.  

On the basis of these materials and in order to delve deeper into this problem, the encounter concludes with the collaborative action Añadir contacto (Add Contact), whereby the protagonists are the same attendees in the encounter. The action draws inspiration from a collaborative performance from Andrés Senra that took place on Facebook and subsequently materialised into an artist’s book.

Length: 75 minutes each session

Three centuries on from the birth of Francisco Sabatini, the architect behind the building that housed the former Hospital General de Madrid — Madrid’s General Hospital — and today the site of Museo Reina Sofía, this project of grand modernity which primarily sought to care and heal is substantiated. In their desire to evoke the original architecture and imagine possible responses to present-day challenges, the actions here are set out in two of the Museo’s spaces, shining a light on two temporal and typological conceptions of the architecture that co-exist inside:

This small show occasions a reflection on the infancy of the building from the perspective of the architecture, illustrated through plans of the eighteenth-century hospital displayed on the windows of the cloister on Floor 1, and thereby restoring a project of great architectural ambition and modernity, a project which, upon completion, would have constituted one of the largest hospitals in Europe. The plans bear witness to the colossal scale of the original project, of which only a third was ever built. Three centuries on, the updated value of these documents functions as an archaeology of the present, inside a context in which the role of the Museo is once again aligned towards care.

This intervention brings back the space of original circulation in the interior of the Nouvel Building roof for the public. Inside this space, visitors can discover the architectural transformation of the old hospital into a museum by way of a sound installation with recordings that reproduce the voice and testimonies of professionals who have been decisive in fashioning the building’s identity and were key to its conversion into a museum in the 1980s, either in its creative genesis (via projects that never materialised) or through contributions to its execution. In the 1980s, considerations revolved around how to put the former hospital to use; today, the same reflection leads us to imagine the nature of the Museo’s next architectural intervention.

The Museo Reina Sofía once again joins Radio 3 to celebrate International Museum Day. On this occasion, Room 207 will play host to a series of live performances which will be streamed live and direct on the Radio 3 website. The programme includes participation from Ángel Stanich, La Bien Querida, Mikel Erentxun, Rozalén and Sidonie.

Length: 20 minutes per session