Seminars and Lectures

The Museo Reina Sofía organises two round-table discussions, over two sessions held on consecutive days, focusing on the experiences of community healthcare in Madrid and Trieste in relation to the work of Franco Basaglia and anti-psychiatry.

The colonial-capitalist regime’s micropolitical principle is the abuse of vital forces in all elements of the biosphere — including, naturally, the human element.

Affection in Re-Existence is a project developed by the research group Situated Feminisms, associated with the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre and made up of researchers Elisa Fuenzalida and Jeannette Tineo.  

The work of Charles Ray (Chicago, 1953), one of most renowned sculptors in specialised critique, addresses the phantasmagorical quality of reality. The artist sets out from a questioning of sculpture making, translating daily experiences, memories and contemporary subjects into statuary.

On this occasion, the programme shines a light on cases in Spain and the Southern Cone of South America, starting, firstly, with the unveiling of the exhibition Incomplete Times. Chile, the First Neoliberal Laboratory, in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre (from 21 March to 24 May 2019), and the guided tour by its curator, Nelly Richard.

Feminisms is a publication by L’Internationale online, with its point of departure from the diverse situated perspectives interwoven into movements such as ecofeminism and xenofeminism.

An analysis of the relationships of feminism across history, its affirmation as a political approach after the 2017 struggles and its impact on current transformations of capitalism form the aim of this lecture.

Across a large part of the planet, the feminist movement is inexorably rising to the fore in the transformation of political action and in the postulate of other, more equal and less patriarchal ways of inhabiting the world.  

Created in 1982, the Prelinger Archives form the largest collection of international ephemeral cinema, with over 60,000 advertising, propaganda, educational, and amateur films, as well as home movies and American landscape films shot across the length and breadth of the 20^th century.

Caja de resonancia (Sound Box), an archive of texts, voices, video and performances that searches for the multiple forms radiating contemporary Latin American poetics, is the focal point of the eighth edition of the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme Documents, which revolves around independent artist publications, platforms, networks and publishing spaces, in addition to the potential of archive to reinvent the narratives of art and its ecosystem.

The reappearance of Native Americanness as a displacement and break-away from a modernity in crisis in 1970s and 1980s Latin American art is the subject of this encounter, made up of a lecture by Mexican artist and theorist, Mariana Botey, followed by a conversation with Peruvian researcher and feminist activist, Elisa Fuenzalida.  

The struggles in different corners of the planet with feminisms at the forefront go beyond traditional categories in readings of social movements. Putting into practice ‘the personal is political’ and reshaping our understanding of the political, the feminist tide pulses and proliferates on a global scale with its persistent iterations and capillary potential for dissemination and influence.

The research policy advocated by the Study Centre seeks to function as a collaborative springboard between research groups and independent debate. This approach is behind an encounter, organised with research+rs from the CRUSEV group, to publicly present the results of the European research project Cruising the Seventies, a reformulation of the channels through which the desires and practices of dissident bodies flowed in the late period of Francoism and the Transition to democracy in Spain.

The Chair of Situated Thought. Art and Politics from Latin America seeks to articulate different experiences, adopted stances, modes of doing and initiatives of critical thought as it addresses the idiosyncrasies of an intellectual and artistic production in dialogue with social and political circumstances and underscores the specific conditions of its environment.

This conference, organised inside the framework of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition, centres on the imaginary of the Transition period in Spain via leading figures with specific artistic and activist experience of transitional counterculture, as well as current researchers and artists.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a new series of publications under the title Carta(s) which seeks to broaden the editorial format of the debates that unfold in the institution and beyond. Carta(s), the result of a joint project between the Museo’s Editorial Activities and Public Activities Departments, looks to draw attention to the reverberations between initiatives driven and welcomed by the Museo’s different lines of research and artistic and critical production. The first three recently published volumes include content that was intended for the journal carta, now transformed into this series.

The programme Documents, which surveys artists’ publications, platforms, networks and independent publishing spaces, as well as archive’s potential to reinvent narratives on art and its ecosystem, centres its seventh edition on the Argentinian magazine ramona, under the guidance of its editors Gustavo Bruzzone and Kiwi Sanz. 

This encounter sets out to rethink the notion of the archive in its different facets, reflecting on the forms in which history is presented as a disputed territory in building the present.

This international conference examines the media, narratives and practices which have sought to make contemporary visual arts accessible to wide audiences from 1950 to the present.

This seminar of public lectures, film screenings and research workshops explores how contemporary capitalism, in its galloping escalation and capacity to assimilate and produce aspects of private life, works through contradiction as a mechanism of regulation and adaptation.

Theories on the crisis of capitalism have swamped social, political and economic analyses in recent years, with all interpretations, although hugely relevant, generally lacking a proposal for the future. Paul Mason, however, has formulated a theory about the transition to an alternative and impending system — a guide to postcapitalism.

The programme Documents reflects on different thematic spheres in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre: artist publications, platforms, publishing networks, independent publications, and archive as a place that articulates and reinvents narratives about art and its ecosystem. In this, the sixth activity in the series, Mela Dávila, a contributor with documenta, Kassel, and an expert on its holdings, addresses power relations and affective affinities that reveal the institution’s epistolary archive.

Since 2010, the academic year of the Study Centre is inaugurated and closed with a lecture. Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán, Benjamin Buchloh, and Nelly Richard have each explored in their lectures different methodological approaches and tensions affecting art history in recent years. Lucy Lippard will be presenting the seventh lecture within the lecture series of Museo Reina Sofía, which on this occasion will be complemented by a workshop led by Lippard herself.

Putting ourselves in the present and placing this present inside the politics of temporality (taking up the idea of Mario Rufer) cannot be conceived outside the coloniality of power theory, formulated by Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018).

Alyce Mahon, curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning. Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2018 – 7 January 2019), will conduct a pre-opening guided tour of this retrospective, which explores the seventy-year-long career of the American artist.