Multimedia

Presentation of The Potosí Principle by the curatorial team, Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. The Potosí Principle is a research, publication and debate project organized by Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, May 12th - September 6th, 2010), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, October 7th, 2010 - January 3rd, 2011), and Museo Nacional de Arte and Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz, February-May 2011). The Potosí Principle questions modernity by narrating it from the vantage point of the other, introducing the process of European emancipation as a cycle of global domination and exploitation which, having started in the 16th Century, is still ongoing.

An itinerary with Lissette Lagnado and Maria Berrios through the exhibition Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys, and Morphologies (Museo Reina Sofía, May 5 - August 23). Through a series of topics, this conversation poses a specific kind of Modernity, which is neither alternate nor central, but which shows the possibilities of playful and poetic transformation of society and cases of collective pedagogy in architectonic episodes in Latin America in the secord third of the 20th Century.

In relation to Thomas Schütte. Hindsight, this video presents a tour around the exhibition through a dialogue with the German artist, along with Julian Heynen, art historian and director of Kunstsammlung of Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Lynne Cooke, curator of the exhibition and deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía.

For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past. Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection) represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration.

Itinerary of the exhibition Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement, held in Museo Reina Sofía from March 31 to July 12, 2010. Through a selection of works by Mexican artist, the exhibition examines the limits of the art system and the presence of the other in the space of an art institution. Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) produced his work in a confinement of more than three decades in a mental hospital, making his own painting materials and exploring a unique iconography that refers to the estrangement between two worlds, the origin of rural and indigenous Mexico and destination, a United States in the midst of a full-blown industrial development. The question posed by the exhibition is the lack of a non-reductionist vocabulary for understanding artistic categories beyond those undertaken by history of art.

Tacita Dean: The Friar's Doodle (Museo Reina Sofia, Monastery of Silos March 23-June 27) is a site-specific exhibition reviewing the history of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos beyond its monumentality, classifying the traces of everyday life in the scribbles and graffiti of the columns of the cloister. In this inventory, the British artist shows a varied set of uses of space, such as as a witness to the work of the stonemasons, the rudimentary medieval games or the use the monastery as a shelter, building a fragmented and collective cultural history and relating film and photography with the evocations of minor narratives.

The Season of Celebrarions/ La saison des fêtes is a site-specific installation by Pierre Huyghe at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro (March 17 to May 31, 2010) where, from a set of plant species in different seasons planted in a circle, the artist reviews the relationship between nature and tradition, myth, and celebration, recalling how events and the perception of time are determined by fiction and storytelling. In this video, Huyghe explains this site-specific project in relation to a series of constant lines of work which question time as phenomenology and reenactment as a mechanism for representation.

This video introduces an overall vision of Museo Reina Sofía, conceived as an expanded museum with different venues (Sabatini Building, Nouvel Building, Palacio de Cristal and Palacio de Velázquez), and different experiences and audiences. Along with this concept of site, the collection, exhibitions and public activities are shown as a new way of interacting with the program and function of the Museum.

In this interview, Georges Didi-Huberman, the curator of the exhibition ATLAS. How to carry the world on one's back? contemplates the model of the atlas as a mechanism by which to reshape the sensory order of the world and the relationships that are established in the creation of knowledge. Taking the work of Aby Warburg as a point of departure, artistic production is contemplated as a montage, in which things, places and time can be reconfigured.

The work of José Val del Omar (Granada, 1904-Madrid, 1982) goes beyond the usual limits of cinema and technique. The artist developed a particular relationship with poetry, mysticism, experience and moving images throughout his entire career. In contrast with cinema as a spectacle that is merely for contemplation, Val del Omar theorizes on and puts into practice an expanded and physical cinema, which can be summarized in concepts such as apanoramic overflow and diaphonic sound. A video of a conversation with Eugeni Bonet, curator of the exhibition, and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, assistant curator of the exhibition, at Museo Reina Sofía.

The work of Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf, 1941) focuses several decades of careful classification and reordering of the sensible world through the image. With systematic thoroughness, Feldmann classified traces of the society through trivial and banal images and objects, recovering the subjective and narrative power of the image in the viewer. The curator, Helena Tatay, introduces the exhibition, held at the Museo Reina Sofia (September 22, 2010 to February 28, 2011).