Seminars and Lectures

Lecturer and researcher Ann Rigney is a key reference point within contemporary memory studies, conducting research that is situated at the intersections of prose, collective identity and the elusive past.

Durante los años 2022 y 2023, en colaboración con el equipo de Museo en Red (hoy renombrado Museo Tentacular), La Laboratoria participó en el Nodo crítico Investigaciones Militantes de Tejidos conjuntivos, el Programa de Estudios Propios del Museo Reina Sofía. Simultáneamente impulsó y acompañó una serie de estancias donde distintos colectivos, investigador+s y artist+s problematizaron cuestiones muy diversas enfocadas desde la investigación militante como una práctica política que genera conocimiento colectivo. En la tela de araña es un programa de dos jornadas, que incluyen varias conversaciones y una pieza escénica, a modo de culminación de este proceso de investigación y creación.

Ghanaian artist, curator and cultural manager Ibrahim Mahama gives a lecture in the Museo, running through his professional career and exploring the continuities between academic research, artistic creation and current curatorial strategies to reconsider the transformative role of art from the Global South. The lecture is part of the Curatorial Practices Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre bring forward World Book Day to 21 April to participate in the BookCrossing initiative of other Spanish museums and cultural centres. The initiative is about “freeing” a series of books in different public spaces, in this case in the Museo and its surrounding areas. Anyone can take these books home to, once read, repeat the action.

This encounter sets forth a journey through the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The tour, conducted by curator Manuel Borja-Villel, punctuates aspects that make Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) a key artist for the present and culminates in a poetry recital — selected and read by Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann and Victoria Pradilla — on the relationships between the Catalan artist and poetic writing. 

How to rewrite and recount history when its fragments are not in archives? How to tell marginalised, invisible, and even non-imagined stories? These are among the questions that steer Daniellis Hernández Calderón’s search through the visual arts. 

Queer. L.E. The Second Queer Literature Encounter encompasses a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives from different angles and perspectives in literature, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. 

Through poetry, the moving image and debate, the programme looks to expand social awareness and promote civic commitment in support of robust, effective and urgent measures for the eco-social crisis we are currently facing. The scheduled activities are laid out according to the four laws of ecology formulated by Barry Commoner, a North American biologist and activist.

Mariano Llinás, one of the most original and salient figures in recent cinema, returns after his epic La flor (The Flower, 2018) with a metafictional piece on family, memory and art history. The film explores the process of producing a biographical documentary around the figure of the illustrious architect Clorindo Testa (1923–2013), a friend of the film-maker’s father, the poet and art critic Julio Llinás. In between, akin to a frenetic detective story, suspense, politics, autobiography and, above all, humour convene in what is also an underlying reflection on what film is and what are, if they are actually of use, the narrations the director puts forward.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of Look Closely. Feminist Editathon by Women Creators, a Wikipedia publishing workshop which looks to minimise the gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, contributing to creating and improving new entries by women artists. 

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Caribbean tides and currents, which flow through the Sabatini Building’s Garden and Cloister from 10pm until midnight as part of the ARCOmadrid 2024 closing party. Embracing the themes of this edition of the Madrid art fair, The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, DJ Valerie Brathwaite and Toccororo will unfurl a sound-based connection between distant shores, and with influences and approaches that are as interesting as they are different.

This encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. The texts, gathered in the volume Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024], edited by Aurora Carmenate Díaz, are the pretext for celebrating the forms of making and the networks Díaz Bringas wove throughout her life.

The 25th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 7 and 8 March 2024. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

José Rodríguez Soltero (Santurce, 1943 – New York, 2009) was an experimental film-maker whose productions were made across the 1960s and 1970s. His audiovisual work stands at the intersection of the avant-garde, queer representations and Latin culture from that era (specifically, Nuyoricans: Puerto Ricans living in New York). This film series screens all three and features presentations by Juan A. Suárez, a specialist in North American underground cinema, Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and protagonist in Dialogue with Che, and MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of the three works.