Activities

This fresh edition of the LGBTIAQ+ programme looks to explore the possibility of imaginatively and politically turning around the logics of hate and fear that run through us, socially raising questions around who personifies a non-normative sex-gender or body position.

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Bachelor’s Degree in Art at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum.

This congress analyses the different levels and dynamics of confrontation employed by forms of militarised communication on their path to permeating social life and manipulating the collective experience of the present.

Since December 2022, via the programme Perturbable School II, seminars on political violence and institutions, the work of Margarita Azurdia, and other situated voices, this Temporary Intensity Zone raises questions around the illness and healing of the institutions that shape us and the bodies with which we traverse and make them.

This TIZ reflects on ghostly relationships, the relationships of events with history, of citizens with politics, of inhabitants with the home or of the missing with those still waiting for them. In the month of the dead, we think about mourning and lamenting, memory and forgetting, and forms of presence and disappearance from the unique spectrality which the same idea of a museum imposes upon us.

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.

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 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.

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.  

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.   

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. 

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.

In the Meantime seeks to offer diverse possibilities for thinking about and placing context around the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 show, organised inside a framework of cultural cooperation between Spain and Morocco in the sphere of Museums and promoted by the National Foundation of Museums from the Kingdom of Morocco and the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, in collaboration with Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

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.    

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.

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.

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.

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.  

Actions such as this one undertaken by collectives comprising the Museo Situado network enable visibility to be granted to the constant collective strength that seeks to resolve urgent issues that arise, both in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and in other areas of the Community of Madrid.   

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

After the Event focuses on the progression of the social uprisings that occurred between 2010 and 2013. From Turkey to Spain, Greece, Syria and Egypt, the locations of this unrest, the movements shook existing political systems and, at times, even brought them to their knees.

The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. On this occasion, artist Azucena Vieites will conduct a workshop on collective practices related to the feminist and queer fanzine.

From a trans-hack-feminist perspective, researchers Laura Benítez and Paula Pin set forth this co-laboratory based on Do It Yourself and Do It Together bio(info)technology — namely, self-managed and collective forms of organisation, work, care, learning, and so on — with which to consider a critical review of gynaecology through tools and technology of biological exploration.

Affection in Re-Existence is a project developed by the research group Situated Feminisms, associated with the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre and made up of researchers Elisa Fuenzalida and Jeannette Tineo.  

Across a large part of the planet, the feminist movement is inexorably rising to the fore in the transformation of political action and in the postulate of other, more equal and less patriarchal ways of inhabiting the world.  

Throughout her life, German artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) produced different compositions with scores stretching across – in much the same way as her installations – large-scale numerical tables on paper. According to Darboven, her “systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations”.

The programme Documents, which surveys artists’ publications, platforms, networks and independent publishing spaces, as well as archive’s potential to reinvent narratives on art and its ecosystem, centres its seventh edition on the Argentinian magazine ramona, under the guidance of its editors Gustavo Bruzzone and Kiwi Sanz. 

Since 2010, the academic year of the Study Centre is inaugurated and closed with a lecture. Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán, Benjamin Buchloh, and Nelly Richard have each explored in their lectures different methodological approaches and tensions affecting art history in recent years. Lucy Lippard will be presenting the seventh lecture within the lecture series of Museo Reina Sofía, which on this occasion will be complemented by a workshop led by Lippard herself.

This third session in the series Six Contradictions and the End of the Present is centred on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, activist and African American theorist, and Yayo Herrero, anthropologist, technical engineer, social educator and ecofeminist. These sessions will reflect on racial difference and care as a point of departure for contemplating a more just and equal society, putting forward a life which is possible outside ideas of production and economic value.

As part of the A possible strength: towards a poietics of living together activities program, this reading group and collective reflection emerge with the goal of revisiting a past that reverberates in the present.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

The meteoric rise of digital giants worldwide has posed a raft of unsettling questions on the concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of tech brokers.

This session will analyse and discuss the possible alternatives to this invisible and all-powerful government of the algorithm and Big Data, ranging from the design of new data ownership models to algorithms being subjected to audits, via the creation of cooperate platforms or the comprehensive nationalisation of technology platforms. 

In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

The Museo Reina Sofía hosts the opening session of Starting from Peter Weiss, organised by the Centro de Documentación Crítica (Critical Documentation Centre) to commemorate the centenary of the German dramatist’s birth. 

Inside the framework of the 2015-2016 Research Residencies, the playwright, stage director, writer and visual artist Javier Montero puts forward a project of critical research and collective production regarding the different forms of creativity, and the role they play in producing new subjectivities.

After organising activities with Merce Cunningham and Simone Forti, the Museo presents the choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton (USA, 1939), a central figure in the development of contemporary dance and the creator of contact improvisation. On this occasion Bound, a solo devised by Paxton, will be performed, for the first time in Spain, by the dancer Jurij Konjar, who will also hold a workshop.

The Internet has produced new behaviours, subjectivities and institutions linked to another way of being and doing. This seminar debates how these changes throw established categories of art, the author and the circulation of unique work off balance, whilst also forming profound contradictions – from creativity as an economic value to indistinct work time. Is considering another artistic ecosystem possible from these ambiguities?

A programme of actions and activities within the context of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, devised by the collective Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana). These actions take place inside the galleries of the exhibition and feature participation from different social and cultural collectives.

This encounter reflects on the formation of a new type of European political and cultural agency following the exhaustion of a union based on the market economy and on the precarious geopolitical balance of the States.

This activity presents the research conducted by Pulska Grupa, a Croatian collective of architects and urban planners who have been research residents at Museo Reina Sofía in 2012-2013.