Seminars and Lectures

Three mysterious occurrences in a city haunted by images, of people known to me, and others unknown. Images abandoned by their occupants; some have become ruins. An image is invaded, a new face moves in—sometimes an ally, sometimes an old foe. One vanishes, while another travels from one picture to another

Rabih Mroué.

Closely connected to the Computing Centre, the visual poet, experimental artist, researcher, professor and writer Ignacio Gómez de Liaño is one of the essential references in Spanish art in the 1970s. This book of memories recounts that period's most important events and describes many of their protagonists. The book, the Spanish title of which is En la red del tiempo 1972 -1977, constitutes an indispensable document in any effort to understand contemporary art practices in the final years of the dictatorship.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

The main purpose of universities is generally understood to revolve around teaching and research, but these institutions also have other important roles that tend to receive less attention. This event looks at the architectural and artistic heritage belonging to Spain's National University of Distance Education (UNED). The collection is brought together for the first time in this publication, which examines how contemporary art has been collected, exhibited and supported by the university as an institution.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault suggested that for each model of power there was a specific way of organising sexuality and reproduction and that this organisation was concentrated in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the factory. All of these are now in decline, so we must ask ourselves: What model of somatopolitial administration characterises contemporary neoliberal society, following the crisis occurring in Foucault's clinic? This lecture is the inaugural event of Somatheque 2013.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This lecture looks at the interaction between narrations of social and economic recession and narrations of the visual arts crisis since the 1960s. Do these stories take place in parallel or are they a form of cultural critique? How does the economic recession shape the perception and production of contemporary art? Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University and is also editor of the New Left Review.

This seminar seeks to contribute to the discussion begun by the exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 (MUSAC, León, 24 June 2012 - 23 February 2013). This exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, highlights the role of discourses concerning gender and sexual identities in contemporary Spanish art, a topic traditionally ignored by historiography. The project, in parallel with the successive rearrangements of the Museum's Collection, proposes a rereading of recent art history in Spain, with different eyes and from a different perspective, recovering the work of many female artists who have been unfairly disdained.

Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933) is an essential name in Latin American documentary film. His work is shaped by political issues but manages to avoid propaganda, as he addresses the everyday lives and subjectivities of marginal majorities with a sensibility not altered by melodrama. This retrospective, the most extensive to date, presents a body of work that ranges from the context of Cinema Novo to the analysis of fiction in contemporary film.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.

Museum curators and international specialists gather to discuss the challenges faced by cultural institutions in their endeavour to activate and disseminate contemporary art. The seminar, designed to stimulate dialogue between Europe and Latin America, centers on the search for effective means of cooperation regarding production, research, memory and education.

This seminar studies audiovisual works that use methodologies and processes of a collective nature at different levels. This seminar juxtaposes three fundamental lines of work related to the politics of collaborative practices in the field of images: the audiovisual production of new imaginaries, the participatory experiences they undergo upon reception and a pedagogy of the collective image.

Over the past thirty years, the social sciences have highlighted some aspects of contemporary social life that appear to be incompatible with traditional forms of representation and theatricality: nomadism, liquidity, ongoing identity construction, virtual communication, hyperexhibition, etc. The replacement of a theatre paradigm by a performative paradigm can be understood as a sign of transformation and liberation.

The friction of bodies is a film and video series that presents a broad panorama of different artistic and political manifestations from the 1980s, which arose during and co-existed with the years of repression in Latin America. Many of these videos and films, most of which have never been shown publicly outside of their original contexts, demonstrate the emergency of new political subjects and forms of subcultural participation. The program also includes recent film proposals that look back at the agitated times of the 1980s in this context, to offer different readings or to activate a memory still throbbing within us.

The city, the metropolis, has been presented on numerous occasions (always from the viewpoints of power and knowledge) as a living organism, a body made of physiological functions regulated according to the ideal of a harmonious composition of its parts. This course, however, sets out with the inverse hypothesis: the urban realm as an incoherent multiplicity, as a series of dynamic balances that remain unstable. 

This research and teaching program intends to examine the body as a political and cultural archive, critically distancing itself from approaches that consider the body a corpus, temple, nature, seat of sovereign power, sheath, place of residence, or property. In philosophical terms, it can be said that the modern body (healthy or sick, normal or pathological) does not have an ontological status but rather, a biopolitical and performative status.

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

The Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is a research initiative by Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Banco Santander and YGBArt (Rosina Gómez-Baeza and Lucia Ybarra). Conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, its purpose is to engage in a critical diagnosis of the Spanish art scene, viewed from a variety of standpoints and bringing together many different voices.

The Open Research Zone Subtramas is a series of activities programmed in connection with an art research project exploring the processes and methodologies involved in collaborative audiovisual creation. The program features a review of past experiences, from the 1970s up through current practices. In all of them, images take part in the formation of symbolic spaces that are conducive to the collective production of emotions, subjectivities and autonomous forms of relationality.

This collection offers a broad vision of how some of the audiovisuals now being made in Spain and produced outside of the industry are responding to today's situation of change and structural crisis. It also shows how documentary images constitute one of the most lively spheres for formal experimentation and essay film in the new systems of production and distribution.

El Periférico de Objetos is a theatre group with a dramaturgical style capable of conjuring up the trauma, fear and collective unconscious of the Argentine dictatorship. With both the doll and its manipulator playing a prominent role, its dramatic works, in allusion to Antonin Artaud, Witold Gombrowicz or Heiner Müller, explore the return and liberation of a repressed body. This performance reflects the importance of El Periférico and engages in a dialogue with the exhibition Losing the human form.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

Inspired by the tragic event that took place 75 years ago, Guernica is much more than a work of art. It has become a universal statement on the massacre. This condition, a synthesis of avant-garde pursuits and political engagement, has had a great influence not only on the visual arts but also on literature. The poetry reading, given in front of the painting by the writer Bernardo Atxaga (Guipúzcoa, 1951), includes poems by Luis Cernuda and Paul Éluard and traces the impact that the mural by Pablo Picasso has had on the written word.

Eric Andersen (Antwerp, 1940) has been linked to Fluxus from practically the very beginning. In 1962, he had the idea of organising a festival in Copenhagen's Nikolai Church. Before that he was involved in setting up art-poetry networks throughout Europe. His participation in this Festum Fluxorum, as the most public and festive qualities of Fluxus were known, was the beginning of a long collaboration in an array of Fluxus events that continue to this day.

The Península group is a debate platform on art, coloniality and curatorship related to Spanish and Portuguese history, their colonial processes and the latency of their power relations in the present. The group offers researchers, academics, post-graduate students, artists and those interested in this debate theme the opportunity to participate in a series of work and discussion encounters. At the core is an analysis of the role of the Iberian Peninsula in colonial processes, the visibility of representations and narrations from diverse past and present institutional spheres, in addition to the responses of artists, curators and researchers regarding some of the problems that stem from these narrations.

In his 1936 essay, The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin uses the Blaue Blume—the romantic incarnation of unobtainable desire—to signify the artifice and perceived immediacy of film made possible through the concealment of the cinematic apparatus.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that reflect the various facets of contemporary musical creation.

Fluxus to the People is a program of concerts, activities, guided tours, lectures and also a documentary exhibition, all of which explore the imagination of the collective, the idea of art as a community tool and the process of de-specialization of the artist figure that is at the heart of the Fluxus movement. This program has consciously been given the format of a festival. First of all, it defends the playful, participatory and even burlesque nature of many of the avant-garde manifestations from 1960 onwards. Secondly, it explores new ways of approaching contemporary art from public activity.

Once again the Museum is collaborating with Mov_s, an event directed by professionals of the moving arts, dance and contemporary creation. On this occasion the Museum provides a space in which to reflect on operations in the area of dance in Latin America today, and to share lines of thinking and experiences.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.

This seminar brings together Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Castro Flórez and José Díaz Cuyás, with the idea of questioning the construction of the recent narrations of the last few decades of art in Spain. The seminar engages in a critique of the interpretations of Nacho Criado as an artist focused on the idea of the collapse of language and on the idea of art.

A lecture by Anne Wagner, a professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of California. In the conference she puts forward a guide to the cosmos of artist Rosemarie Trockel, setting out from the study of a number of recent works in relation to the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: a cosmos.

This symposium brings together a group of art historians whose work is known for its interdisciplinary approach, its innovative methodology and its relevance in meditating on the way we think about, write about and imagine art history today.

Presentation of the book La abeja y el economista (The Bee and the Economist), by Yann Moulier Bountang, co-editor of the magazine Multitudes and professor of political economy. He is one of the main people responsible for the design theory on the critique of the political economy of cognitive capitalism.

Taking as a pretext the masterpiece The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach we enter a world in which form and constructive balance represent a large part of the seduction, while never leaving behind an expressive search through the compositional formulas, processes, repetitions, calculations, counterpoint, etc, that have such a great presence in all of these works.

The Sonor Ensemble, directed by its founder Luis Aguirre, brings Auditorium 400 a program that has dance as its central axis. Six pieces by Hungarian and Spanish writers, including a new one, commissioned by the CNDM, named Danzas entrelazadas, by Madrid's José Luis Turina (1952), a piece that examines the poetics related to movement and dance.

This activity sees artist Sharon Hayes enter into dialogue with Beatriz Preciado, coordinator of the seminar Somateca, and students from the Critical Practices Programme, as well as the general public with an interest in the subject. The encounter marks the start of an individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo, entitled Habla.

On this occasion, dance leaves the conventional setting of a stage to become an integral part of the exhibition space. In this activity, young CND choreographers make a series of proposals that work with the concepts of manipulation and the search for the unknown.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that show the various facets of contemporary musical creation. After the editions of 2011, in which musicians such as Peter Broderick, Bugge Wesseltoft, Cibelle, Oy, Mastretta and Lonely Drifter Karen, took part, Museo Reina Sofía once again lends its support to music, with an eclectic sample of proposals that attempt to draw a map of the array of trends making up today's diverse musical scene.

This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita, which have as a backdrop the military coup in Chile.