Seminars and Lectures

Slumil K’ajxemk’op — which means “rebel land” in Tzotzil, a Mayan dialect — is how the Zapatista delegation renamed Europe during its visit to the continent in 2021. A gift for being aware of and recognising ourselves as part of another Europe “abducted” from itself, and which invites us to reinvent our ties to the past in an emancipatory mode of expression, to the point of returning our otherness to us: the non-suppressed condition.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986.

This seventh edition of Graphic Outbreak witnesses Delight Lab, in collaboration with Vórtice Creativo CIMA, seeking to create a space of reflection to collectively build slogans that can be projected in public space using the video mapping technique and which help to stress social problems such as health exclusion in the Spanish State. Following the passing of Royal Decree-Law 16/2012, of 20 April, access to the National Health System (SNS) in Spain is linked to people’s administrative situation, making it increasingly less accessible and universal. Above all, this situation afflicts undocumented migrant people, who experience long waits and unpayable bills, putting their life at risk.

Graphic Outbreak 6. O Corpo como Poética da Luta is a workshop organised by Coletivo Alvorada and shines a light on the body, flash mobs and textiles as strategies to burst into public space.

Algorithms is an evening of music based on a set of mathematical instructions describing the homonym concept. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía offers a session of guided listening with two pieces for piano by Iannis Xenakis: Herma (1961) and Evryali (1973), performed by Magdalena Cerezo Falces. To make Xenakis’s method of mathematical composition legible, the performer is joined by musicologist and educator Marina Hervás and artist Marta Verdem, whose visuals are designed specifically for the event. This will be followed by Xenakis’s piece La légende d’eer (1977-1978) performed by musician Sergio Luque, with the collaboration of Juan Carlos Blancas. 

On this occasion, work is carried out specifically with the campaign #ESenciales* #RegularizacionYa (#ESsential* #RegularisationNow), which fights to obtain the extraordinary regularisation of 500,000 people in an irregular administrative situation and who cannot exercise their rights in the Spanish State.

This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties. 

The Museo Reina Sofía once again celebrates International Museum Day. This year the slogan put forward by ICOM is “The Power of Museums” to highlight the potential of cultural institutions in our societies.

Bioliteratures 1 is conceived as a series of sessions in which writing forms converge around authors whose careers defy distances between subject and language, between the self and us, between the public and the private. For this first session, made up of two round-table discussions, the literary work of Rafael Chirbes, which speaks to us of disarticulated and violent nature intrinsically constituting our times, has been selected.

Four decades on from the Rompente collective’s disbandment, this encounter is organised to reflect and work upon the historical significance of this community of artists, poets, musicians and likeminded figures, and upon the collective’s memory, forms of artistic production and political by-products.

Neighbourhood memories belong to the inhabitants — their situated experiences, relationships, celebrations, conflicts and traumas — the spaces they occupy, mutual support networks and struggles to improve both their lives and their environment.

Political matter requires a non-dissociation of art and politics with regard to artisan work, and modes of occupying time and the relationship it articulates. 

This presentation will share some of the findings and proposals from the study carried out by researchers José Ariza and Yeison García, inside the framework of the programme of research residencies from the FelipaManuela platform

This drift seeks to retrieve the sounds, attitudes and different forms of experiencing the city that shared time and space with this early bohemia via cuplés. The cuplé was conceived as a music genre with a double form: at once iconoclastic, transgressive and sexual and with empowered and feminist lyrics, as well as a mise en scène linked to the absurdism and nonsensicality of Dadaism and its cabaret scenes.

When you hear the word “library”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Books? Full shelves? Study? Complete silence? This architecture workshop invites people to discover the nature of the Museo Reina Sofía Library, the history of its construction and the use of its space while passing through. What’s it like inside? What happens if it is explored with a set objective or from another perspective? No doubt there will be unexpected discoveries!

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre bring World Book Day forward to Friday, 22 April, joining different Spanish museums and cultural centres in flooding cities with books. In this new instalment of BookCrossing, publications related to contemporary art will be freed up during the whole day.

The encounter Three Painters, Two Writers, One Legacy is held inside the framework of Book Night and features the participation of Marcos Giralt Torrente, Rodrigo Muñoz Avia and Beatriz Nogal.

This spring, different forms of reading, writing practices and literature gain prominence in the Museo with a second Temporary Intensity Zone (TIZ) opening under the title, aligned with the ideas of poet and historian Ángel González, Escribir sin tener ni idea (Writing With No Idea). This programme looks to explore how words, narrative, can expand beyond literature and towards new territories of artistic creation and reflection of thought in the contemporary world.

The Museo Reina Sofía screens There Is Nothing to Understand Here, a documentary on artist Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940 — Azpirotz, Navarra, 2015), along with two of her unreleased short digital animation films. The documentary, made by Javi Álvarez and Olga Sevillano and produced by the Museo, is shown for the first time in Madrid following its international premiere at the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Navarra and a brief online viewing in May and June 2020.

In conjunction with the exhibition Belkis Ayón. Collographs (17 November 2021 – 18 April 2022), the Museo organises a tour through the show and a conversation with its curator Cristina Vives and Cuban artists Alexandre Arrechea and Luis Cabrera, both closely related to the figure of Ayón.

On this occasion, different specialist voices with an interest in the work of Maruja Mallo engage in conversation about her output following her return from exile and explore a selection of her late works, made from 1975 to 1982, conserved in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.

With the collective Red Solidaria de Acogida (the Refuge Solidarity Network) — a member of Museo Situado’s collaboration network — this latest edition of the Situated Voices programme seeks dialogue around this issue, which primarily afflicts undocumented migrant people whose lives are drained in a constant wait that leaves them on their own to face illness.

Artist Andrea Büttner and Isabella Lenzi, an independent curator and research fellow in the Museo’s Collections Department, engage in conversation about Büttner’s work, which is part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new re-hang of the Collection. This event is organised inside the framework of a series of activations of the Collection throughout the month of March, underscoring feminist artistic practices and the work of women artists.

In this encounter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood present the key aspects of the exhibition From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett, curated by both, in a survey on graphic art’s potential during historical avant-garde movements. 

This edition of Situated Voices, convened from RAMA and in collaboration with Museo Situado, seeks to reflect through young migrant and anti-racist activists to collectively imagine multi-faceted, creative, political and disobedient processes allowing anti-racism to be incorporated into the heart of struggles and thereupon to examine this intersection with other issues around education, participation in the political community, heteromormativity, climate justice, etc.   

This series presents the documentary and non-fiction cinema of five women filmmakers from the Middle East and the Maghreb: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy (Egypt, 1939–2018), Assia Djebar (Algeria, 1936–2015), Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon, 1948–2019), Heiny Srour (Lebanon, 1945) and Selma Baccar (Tunisia, 1945). Despite hailing from different regions and origins, their careers all started in the 1970s and they are representatives of a historical and countercurrent feminism that gives voice to the stories drowned out by the official history in countries of Arab culture.

The 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration and supported by MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 24 and 25 February 2022. As an international encounter it sets out to share and debate experiences and research, open new channels of study and reflect upon the institutional management of conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

These sessions set out from the idea that a feminism with the will for transformation must prioritise the most oppressed and violated needs, giving precedence to those who sustain the reproduction of life with their work. A feminism that is truly transformative must place the material conditions of existence at the centre and be able to build syndicalism based on stable networks of mutual support, politicising individual problems and allowing struggles to connect, and at the same time intersecting racial, gender and class oppression.

Across six sessions, the study group Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities seeks to investigate alternative models in cultural and art theory, and in artistic practices, which radically challenge the relationship between animals and humans.  

The programme includes five of Tahimik’s feature-length films and a “carte blanche” session for the director, as well as Tahimik’s first appearance in film as an actor. Further, the series features debates and in-person conversations with the film-maker and his son, collaborator and leading actor, Kidlat de Guia.

Over the past six years, the Southern Conceptualisms Network and Museo Reina Sofía have joined forces to arrange this periodic encounter, which stems from the common sentiment of the need to urgently strike up a dialogue between spaces where memory gestates. This fourth edition, under the title Archives to Come, calls upon imaginative powers underlying archive practices and thought and the way in which they are capable of proposing alterations to the dominant temporalities limiting the construction of other chronologies, the seed of different futures.  

March 8 has become a symbol of protest that flows beyond this date to solidify synergies and feminist, historical and present struggles. For over a century now, this day has condensed and amplified a first basic premise: rights for all women always, every single day. From numerous corners, from the past and the present, we aspire to many more 8Ms — every single day. In this way, this program started in February will be extended until June. 

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a video programme created by contemporary Turkish artists, featuring works commissioned by the SALT Contemporary Art Centre — with sites in Istanbul and Ankara — to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the institution. Under the title Ardışık (The Sequential), the programme sketches the scene of the most salient recent art in Turkey and is set forth as a reflection of the major debates taking place in the country.

This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.

Archipelago once again makes its yearly return, inviting audiences to explore the complexity of the contemporary world through listening. In this particular edition, it looks to delve into the discourse of modernity in experimental music, its unrecognised roots and the history, politics and ideologies that govern our tastes.

This new edition analyses the presence of architecture in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive, a repository of memory containing, in fragments, the history of the institution: its origins as a hospital of neoclassicism, its role during the Spanish Civil War as a field hospital, its transformation into an art centre and its expansion as an international museum. Various landmarks that enable a micro history of civil and public architecture to be traced from the 18th century to the present day, but without losing sight of the process of configuration and the idea of what a museum must be.

This lecture series, the third instalment organised by the interuniversity group TURICOM — which is part of the project Paradoxical Modernity: Artistic and Tourist Experience in Developmentalist Spain (1959–1975), PGC2018-093422-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) — endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. . More specifically, this new edition centres on the concept of ruin as a centre of attraction for cultural habits and practices inside the sphere of tourism.

ESTUDIO III in Conversation is an encounter which is part of ESTUDIO III. Go Out to Encounter. Speak to Place, the third edition of a programme which brings together the investigations of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the third edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats 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.

This round-table discussion on municipalist graphic art concludes the programme of this new edition, following an initial creative workshop conducted by Enrique Flores and held from 10 to 12 November 2021.

Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1902 – Madrid, 1995) is considered a key artist in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This encounter presents the catalogue raisonnée of oil paintings from her artistic practice as a whole and brings together many of the foremost specialists to have worked on her output.