Seminars and Lectures

The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms is a programme on methodologies, tools and techniques in artistic practice. In its fourth edition, Teresa Lanceta conveys, via an online public lecture, the learning attained in her explorations of the rhombus. Based on her reflections, she will conduct a workshop whereby each participant can share and set up a dialogue with ‘their own form’, which stems either from their work or any other meaningful sphere in their life.   

This international seminar prompts passage from violence and fear to the community of affection (“to be affected by” and “to affect”), drawing on social activism, artistic creation and critical thought to range across sensibility, language, bodies, imagination and politics.

For Moroccan artist Safaa Erruas (Tetouan, 1976) the act of weaving opens up a rethinking of the history underlying all women: the history of our bodies, our lived experiences, our travels, materialising and entwining with the histories of other people who simultaneously weave the same cloth. This workshop is geared towards the collective production of a textile piece which, in contrast to traditional weaving, comprises objects and elements from our daily lives. 

But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others. Film and Indigenous Lives encompasses a broad chronological arc that spans from 1970 to 2020, from the indiscriminate massacre known in Latin America as ethnocide to the Zapatista delegation’s recent journey from the Chiapas jungle to Europe’s major cities; a journey which seeks to rediscover models of co-existence and good living for a worn-out West.

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.

By delving deeper into the domesticity of appliance, this activity also seeks to widen the margins of listening to different inhabitants and agents — human and non-human, vegetative, electro-domestic — that make up our domestic space, or what we call house or home. Different forms that make up the same place, different territories in which different temporalities cross over and from which perspectives that reach remote locations open.

At the confluence of art and activism, this workshop looks to cast a critical gaze on the representation of bodies, sexuality and gender in a clear confrontation with restrictions imposed by society, laws and religions. Over the course of three three-hour sessions in the company of illustrator and activist Zainab Fasiki, participants will collectively produce a fanzine.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s annual summer cinema returns once again, focusing this year on rediscovering a central part of African cinema which, by way of the strength of its fiction, challenges the images with which the West tries to invade it.

Learning to make figures with string initiates experimentation with knots and weaves that interrelate the body, memory and language; figures that can also be taken apart to be started again in another way. Creating string figures thus interweaves moments of viewing, listening, conversing — for instance, about minimal existences — and pausing.

This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions.

This encounter sees feminist illustrator Zainab Fasiki (Fez, 1994), writer Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) — both participants in and advocates of L’amour fait loi — and writer Najat El Hachmi (Nador, 1979), author of the novel On Monday We Will Be Loved, discuss the protests that have arisen in Morocco through the increasingly frequent actions in defence of sexual rights. They also look at the need for other accounts and imaginaries that reflect the complexity, diversity and richness of Morocco’s intimate territory and its diaspora, habitually accounted for and represented with the simplification and reductionism exuded by the colonial and exoticizing gaze.

New trans* feminism, anti-colonial and non-binary struggles, incorporated by different bodies and generations, have undoubtedly resignified the meaning of queer, just as positions reclaiming a new normal have been reformulated.

Harvest 2021, therefore, sets out a debate and reflection around publishing and producing photobooks, inviting people immersed in the layout phase of a project to share their photographic works with the other participants.

A group of feminist lawyers, journalists and producers formed the observer brigade Open the Gates! in May 2021, with the aim of documenting and granting visibility to the work and living situation of numerous female day labourers, both local and seasonal migrant workers.

Eddi Circa and Cruhda are two voices of feminism in Madrid. In sharply contrasting tones, Cruhda evokes dark, electronic sounds, re-visiting earthly sounds from the Castilian plateau farmland for a future that invokes metamorphosis. Eddi Circa, for her part, creates non-hetero culture with her lyrics, ranging from a guitar accompaniment to the rudiments of trap and drawing from “hits” taken to get life back again.