Seminars and Lectures

In a session set up as half workshop, half relational theatre and a ghostly escape room, the activity becomes an immersive experience encompassing teaching, play and popular culture. All starting from the premise: If there’s something strange in your library, who’re you going to call?

Thinking about the World from Art and Science is an activity organised by the Museo Reina Sofía to present the CNIO Arte project, an initiative run by the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicos (the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre), which has combined contemporary art and science since 2018. The project seeks to spark dialogue between international scientists and artists to explore common territories and to produce work from this conversation.

This fresh instalment examines an unexplored side of Joan Miró’s career: his poetic pursuit and the influence of poetry on his work. Therefore, the activity comprises a round-table discussion, conducted by specialists Olvido García Valdés, María González Menéndez and Carlos Martín García, and is centred on the analysis of a poetic text written by Miró, regarded as a possible manifesto of his artistic work. 

The Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter in memory of cultural manager Berta Sureda (Barcelona, 1959 – Palma de Mallorca, 2024), whose work was pivotal in opening new horizons in cultural institutions, placing creators front and centre and driving forward citizen participation. The activity here comprises a series of interventions by different cultural agents and fellow professionals and is conducted, in parallel, in the Museo Reina Sofía and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), with a live streaming between both spaces. The interventions will be followed by a dance piece by the company Mal Pelo, performed by María Muñoz.

This edition is devoted to de caballos y guitarras (Of Horses and Guitars, 2024), the latest feature-length film by artist, curator and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964), who will also present the film in both sessions. After the screening in the first session, the artist will take part in a discussion with the audience, while the second showing will be followed by a concert performed by Raül Refree and Alfredo Lagos.

American film-makers Serge Garcia and Richard Shpuntoff, selected for the second edition of the annual Joaquim Jordà Residencies, organised conjointly by the Museo Reina Sofía, Doclisboa and FIDMarseille, present a selection of their films, in addition to the projects they are working on during the residency.

The Museo Reina Sofía joins with the Festival de las Ideas (the Festival of Ideas), a new event which operates under the slogan “Thought Takes to the Streets” and comes into being with the aim of disseminating contemporary theory and, in the process, filling Madrid’s streets, squares and cultural spaces with concepts. In its first edition, which orbits around catharsis, the Museo welcomes a reflective walk around the Collection, led by artist Marina Núñez.  

The sixth edition of Art and Tourism Imaginaries, an encounter series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets forth a study which explores the phenomenon of postcards and their impact on shaping the themes and stereotypes which have formed the collective imaginary of geographies, peoples and consumer habits in contemporary visual culture.

The activity is made up of a morning workshop — split into three groups with different access — which aims to raise awareness, through four stations based on the principles of four-colour printing, of the array of possibilities within the artist’s book, from its poetic beginnings with Mallarmé and Apollinaire to its more contemporary expressions.

This workshop, run by Miguel Alan Córdova Silva and Víctor Hugo Robles, is based on publishing content related to LGBTIAQ+ subject matter on Wikipedia in Spanish. The new entries and translations carried out during the activity will be added to Wikiproyecto LGBT+ (LGBT+ Wikiproject), a Wikimedia Foundation project which advocates the development of content related to concepts and proper nouns from LGBT+ and queer themes, with the stress placed on Spanish-speaking activists to enhance their reach and improve articles on Wikipedia.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s outdoor summer cinema series returns, once again, in the Sabatini Building Garden throughout the months of July and August. The subject matter of this year’s edition explores how film reflects on itself or, similarly: how film thinks about film. From its origins to the present day, the film medium has explored its own nature from different perspectives: as a magical phenomenon of light and time, as a creative obsession, as an industry with its trades, conditions and precarities or as a series of narrations that depict a community.

Ecologies of Utopian Desire, held inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, welcomes draughtsman and writer Miguel Brieva, who, across his career, has created a realm from which to imagine ecologically desirable worlds. Brieva is joined by researchers Julia Ramírez-Blanco and Alberto Berzosa to reflect, in conversation, on how to dream of better worlds, with an awareness of the political agency of these dreams and their viability and ideology.

La instalación de Eva Lootz La agonía de las lenguas (2020), que forma parte de la exposición Eva Lootz. Hacer como quien dice: ¿y esto qué es?, alerta sobre la extinción y la invisibilidad de los idiomas originarios amerindios como consecuencia de la pervivencia de dinámicas coloniales. La artista aborda con metáforas y procesos materiales la amplitud y originalidad de estas lenguas, pero también la paradoja de que gran parte de la academia no las considere idiomas de cultura y, por tanto, su enseñanza reglada sea testimonial. A partir de estas ideas, este taller propone debatir el lugar de estas lenguas en la educación oficial y poner en valor su singularidad a la hora de modificar nuestra experiencia y relación con el mundo.

The performances of James Lee Byars (Detroit, Michigan, 1932 – Cairo, 1997) bring together the aesthetic and life concerns of this unique artist. In conjunction with the exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to the artist, under the title James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question, and inside the framework of the programme Living Matter. Other Approaches to Material, this day re-stages, over two sessions, a selection of James Lee Byars’s performances, which open a dialogue with his visual work inside the space of the show. In the form of a coda, the activity also includes the presentation of a new performance conceived specifically for the occasion, Acaeció en Granada, which explores Byars’s relationship with the artist Miguel Benlloch (Loja, Granada, 1954 – Seville, 2018) in the city of Granada.