Seminars and Lectures

On the basis that humour is never neutral, as well as its capacity to question the established order and work as a powerful normalising force, this encounter interrogates supposedly humorous images which instead instil prejudice and normalise stereotypes.

They Wanted Arms but People Arrived is a radio series and theatre piece on migration and domestic work, written and performed by women from the Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory) association and featuring the participation of sound artist Susana Jiménez Carmona and the work cooperative Pandora Mirabilia.

This edition of the Chair, comprising a master lecture and a seminar, sees Margarita Ledo set forth a reflection on the body as a remnant, as a point of arrival after tracing an invisible thread that extends across film based on memory, anti-establishment practices, the marginalisation of women in public spaces, the estrangement of their own bodies and the power of essay films as an artistic practice.

What would happen if we thought of care as a job? What is stopping us from thinking that way? What is gained and what is lost? Why don’t those who provide care have the right to rest, retire and receive payment? Why does this activity remain marginalised from the productive, the public and the visible? And what if we thought and wrote about rights, payment and the relationships of bodies that gestate and support?

On the ocassion of the Concha Jerez retrospective, Our Memory Is Being Stolen (29 July – 11 January 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter with the artist, alongside critic and theorist Mieke Bal and critic and exhibition curator Fernando Castro Flórez, two figures behind the exhibition catalogue and the participation of Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofía.

The two volumes of Theremonial (Beat Generation, 2017 and 2019) see Javier Díez Ena pay homage to the timbre of the theremin, a musical instrument, invented in 1919 by Russian musician Lev Termen, with a sound customarily associated with US horror film and sci-fi scores from the 1950s or as an ominous addition in relatively traditional pop music creations.

Gestural Apparatuses and Echoic Landscapes is a workshop which approaches the revolt of the “singular guerrilla” composed in Fernand Deligny’s endeavours in Cévennes National Park, France, between 1969 and 1996.    

Territorio Doméstico: Politicising Aprons, Pots and Streets is a documentary audiovisual piece that records the history of the make-up and struggle of the feminist collective Territorio Doméstico, a group of domestic workers who live in the Community of Madrid but come from all over the world.  

The programme Together and Rising Up assembles a series of activities, exhibitions, rooms from the Collection, study groups, guided tours and digital projects inside the Museo, to be presented over the course of 2021, and thus reflecting the plural nature of transfeminist struggles and the complexity of new challenges for feminism. 

Night of Ideas is an annual event propelled since 2016 by the Institut français in Paris and occasions a reflection on the major challenges of our times. The sixth edition of the event in 2021 is held under the title Proches (Close) and sets out to rethink the relations between living beings and new forms of solidarity.

Pan-Pan Kolektiva sets out from the hypothesis that the current situation is giving rise to collective trauma and from the following question: Do we have the necessary tools to listen to each other or do we need to create new ones?

The 2021 Aníbal Quijano Chair programme, organised by Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre, will seek to address and disentangle the meanings of that paradox from far-reaching perspectives and political projects of the present — feminisms, environmentalism, anti-racist and decolonial movements — taken as vectors which question and stir political orthodoxies.

In a remembrance of Samba on the anniversary of her death, the Platform in Memory of Samba and Museo Situado organised a participatory action involving the creation of a large collective bunch of flowers made up of artworks in different formats and left on 19 December 2020 in the cemetery where her body lies. In total, more than forty works in her memory were submitted.

What are we talking about when we say indigenous contemporary art? How can we approach racialised artistic practices, beyond a violent colonial translation? What does it mean to think about ancestry as an ontological force? This activity, the title of which draws inspiration from the poem Ojer bix re ri kik’el (The Blood’s Old Song), by the K’iche’ Maya writer Humberto Ak’abal, sets forth an introduction to artistic practices articulated from places of occlusion and silence.  

Narcisa Hirsch is one of the foremost figures in the history of Latin American and international experimental film. Born in Germany in 1928, and living in Argentina since her childhood, her name has lurked in the shadows unduly, owing to a twofold “eccentricity”: being a woman and making films that lie outside central spaces constructing the history of this filmic modality: the United States and Europe.  

This encounter, therefore, sets out to convene, converse with and create fruitful exchanges between some of the leading figures in these struggles, setting out from the conviction that, from their view of the world, their networks of self-protection and their ways of “shouldering” rebellion, they are developing the syndicalist feminism to come.

Carta(s) is a series of publications with which the Museo Reina Sofía seeks to broaden, through the publishing format, some of the debates that take place in the institution and beyond its walls, granting visibility to initiatives propelled or embraced by the Museo’s different lines of research and its artistic and critical productions. The presentation of this new publication takes the form of an encounter between the authors of the texts (Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and María Rosón), sociologist and feminist archivist Javiera Manzi and artist and cultural critic Marcelo Expósito. 

The collective imaginary and information around the propagation and spread of COVID-19 have radically changed the way we relate to one another, so much so that we perceive encounters with others as a threat. 

Like the Palm of My Hand seeks to illuminate new forms of doing from the digital sphere to reflect on virtual possibilities in cultural institutions. 

In the current social climate, the existence of political and cultural forces which appear to be handed down from fascism and historical extreme right movements are today a tangible reality. These forces call into question the continued existence of consolidated emancipatory conquests after centuries of struggle. The programme The New Reaction. Antidotes and Synergies sets out to explore and pinpoint the means that mobilise these forces, understanding the place from which they emanate, the designated enemies and why they are so, and the differences and similitudes they reveal in different geographies.

In a collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the Spanish premiere of Scorpion and Felix, a work by Buenos Aires-based La Columna Durruti, an iconoclastic collective carrying out performance actions and made up of Emilio García Wehbi, Maricel Álvarez, Marcelo Martínez, Julieta Potenze, Martín Antuña, among others.

Songs of the Contemporary Social War is the title of a pamphlet made by Guy Debord, signed anonymously under the pseudonym “Some iconoclasts” and dated May 1981.

The Museo Reina Sofía takes part in the 15^th edition of Book Night, an initiative organised by the Community of Madrid to promote reading and grant visibility to the activities of different cultural centres and institutions inside this sphere.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents, in a collaboration with the Oslo Biennial (2019–2024), Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project in which people from different countries learn books of their choice by heart. Together they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated points, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.  

Between August and September 2015, Pablo Sanz conducted fieldwork in the Amanã and Mamirauá reserves in Brazil’s central Amazon. These recordings make up the material that forms entangled, a project that folds out into a series of multi-channel, ambisonic installations, events and concerts adapted to the place in which they are set up. 

Every autumn since 2016, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española have organised an audiovisual season which combines, over a two-month period, the film programmes of both institutions. The 2020 retrospective shines a light on Derek Jarman (1942–1994), painter, film-maker, gay rights activist, stage designer, writer and gardener.

The Museo’s Education Area sets in motion a series of actions, listening journeys, encounters and mediation projects to accompany and amplify these exhibitions, inviting participation for anyone interested in absorbing and reflecting on sounds to form a diverse group of hearers and listeners that can, at the same time, transmit back their experiences and impressions.

Museo Reina Sofía and the cooperative Mbolo Moy Dole organise two weekly dance and theatre workshops conducted by teacher Deisy Mesías García, whereby female domestic workers approach movement in a way that expands beyond its functional value and work.

Over the course of six encounters, the study group Body, Territory and Conflict seeks to develop a space of action and thought focused on the critique of the so-called Anthropocene, a geological era defined by growing and destructive human intervention on the planet.

The crisis brought on by the pandemic continues to highlight the need to urgently drive forward a programme of interpreters-mediators equipped with enough resources and the capacity to operate constantly and effectively in languages such as Bengali, Wolof, Urdu, Arabic, Bambara, Tagalog and Chinese in all spheres of society, where necessary.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.  

ESTUDIO in Conversation is an encounter which makes up part of the second edition of ESTUDIO, “Half Said, Unsaid”, a programme which brings together the enquiries of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.  

Time is a project which, through the collective production of an experimental film, explores the intangible, and the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers, delving deeper into different works from the Collection.

In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.

To conclude this new edition of the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair, Judith Butler gives a lecture on the idea of memory outside hegemonic readings of history, drawing from mottos/slogans, poems, posters, excerpts from texts, and materials that look to concisely transmit something lost from the past.

The Museo Reina Sofía devotes a month of its audiovisual programme to the history of film on art, organising a series that pivots on a set of formal lines stretching back to the 1920s. 

Museo Reina Sofía joins up with Red Interlavapiés (The Interlavapiés Network) to organise a small Spanish Language School for migrant residents in the Community of Madrid who require knowledge and use of the local language as a tool for day-to-day communication, work and involvement in society.  

Recent times have witnessed an outbreak of diverse social uprisings on a global scale (Hong King, Barcelona, Quito, Beirut, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile) to protest against the regime of inequality and social injustice established by neoliberal hegemony.

For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies.

Curated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair articulates different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. This programme of analysis and reflection — put together at the crossroads between the aesthetic, the theoretical, the critical and the political — conceives of memory as an agent with which to decipher and re-read incomplete narratives, the fragments and scenes of which continue to question the present.

By way of documentaries and essay films, this series sets forth different ways of approaching memory to explore the different zones of conflict between subjectivity and politics; between militancy and revolutions; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between memory and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent the present.

Llorenç Barber (Aielo de Malferit, 1948), one of the major reference points in sound experimentation, is the focus of the Museo Reina Sofía’s reacquaintance with live music in an open-air concert for “flying bells” that make the Doppler effect audible as they swing.

Eden, Eden, Eden could be seen as a dramaturgy, in which characters’ movements are sketched on a feverish set. Everything seems to be there for somebody to choreograph the type of unique phrase which happens in a seemingly unique stage space. The Choreography is executed with reading.