Seminars and Lectures

Actress Delphine Seyrig (1932–1990) and artist and film-maker Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009) revitalised the post-1968 feminist movement in France by way of their intensive and pioneering work in video, tearing down, with joy and caustic incision in equal measure, the passive roles attached to women in the 1960s and 1970s. This documentary, with two screenings in different sessions, reconstructs their story.

The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This edition, therefore, presents the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, an audiovisual archive that comprises the first feminist video in France and representations of women in the mass media. 

The third edition of the seminar Archives of the Commons, co-organised by the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) and the Museo Reina Sofía, takes as its point of departure a question that seeks to operate as a concept: Is it possible to put in place an archive as non-appropriable?

The Museo Reina Sofía opens a call to register for the performance piece Udlot Udlot, by José Maceda, in the areas surrounding the Palacio de Cristal. The call is aimed at anyone interested in music and does not require knowledge of music theory.

For the third year running, the programme Archipelago encourages an understanding of the complexity of the contemporary world through listening, exploring what is understood by experimental music and the relation it bears to popular culture by way of different narratives and geographies.

The Intervals series, which screens recent film work, welcomes one of the most arresting and poetic feature-length films in recent years, The Portuguese Woman by Rita Azevedo Gomes (Lisbon, 1952), a director who prolongs that constant tension between experimentation and narrative film-making in her work. 

This year sees the Museo Reina Sofía devote its summer cinema series to ways of appropriating, resisting and imagining the city from the neighbourhood understood as a community with class identity and a shared common history. Taking this main premise as its point of departure, the programme is organised into thematic weeks, in which every Friday and Saturday different films converse.

In conjunction with the solo exhibition David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night, Marion Scemama’s film Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: a Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1989–1991 will be shown for the first time in Spain.

As part of the performing arts series staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents, over two sessions, Corbeaux (Crows), by choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen. Upon the conclusion of the session on Tuesday 2 July, the artist and some of the dancers from the company Compagnie O will engage in an open conversation, presented and moderated by Isabel de Naverán, with the audience. 

From a trans-hack-feminist perspective, researchers Laura Benítez and Paula Pin set forth this co-laboratory based on Do It Yourself and Do It Together bio(info)technology — namely, self-managed and collective forms of organisation, work, care, learning, and so on — with which to consider a critical review of gynaecology through tools and technology of biological exploration.

This eighth edition of Situated Voices, promoted by the Museo Situado network, an initiative in which different migrant collectives and neighbourhood associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood collaborate with the Museo Reina Sofía, reflects on the borders which obstruct crossings and refuge for people in the contemporary world.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the first retrospective on the film work of Josep Renau during his time in exile. This output, chiefly shown for the first time on this occasion, has been recovered by Luis E. Parés after his research into German and Mexican audiovisual archives.