Live Arts

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

This edition turns its attentions towards cavities, both mental and physical, that open in our bodies after the passing-through of other bodies. As porous beings we live in constant relations and exchange with others, not only because we are social, or because we inhabit the planet — filled with other living beings — but because we are the planet. And its history. As part of this planet-being, the proposals in this edition of ESTUDIO take on a poetic responsibility, with Ola Maciejewska, Josu Bilbao and Paz Rojo assaying material forms that are poetic, physical and anatomical, and which entail passing through knowledge knowing that results are not guaranteed.

Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation.

This third edition is articulated around the artistic and discursive trajectory of Tim Etchells and his work with Forced Entertainment, a collective founded in Sheffield, England, in 1984 and made up of Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells as artistic director.

Chile or Utopian Imagination is a programme of activities which gathers film, textile and community art, critical thought and poetry to explore memory in relation to the project of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government, the coup d’état and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile by way of the work of different artists and thinkers.

Maximum Respect. Rap, Tapes and Photocopies sets forth a collective reflection on the origins and pathways of rap in Spain, and also serves to present the research project Proposals, Archives and Communities in the Origins of Rap in Spain, which aims to study, document and catalogue activities related to the self-management and self-release of Spanish rap from its beginnings.

The Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido (Institute of Suspended Time, ITS) is a project by Javier Bassas and Raquel Friera which came into being as a fictitious (non)institution seeking to revise temporal regimes established in society.

In this multimedia stage piece, straddling monologue, confession and the activation of body and music, artist Frau Diamanda looks to explore the mutation of transvestite identity, punctuated by questions of class and race and affected by (neo)colonisation and hyperbolic exaltation.

Notes is a new Museo Reina Sofía project which aims to explore other formats and methodologies to accommodate devices and projects which transversally make disciplines hybrid and ensure they are capable of working on processes from erraticism as a possibility.  

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.

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges. This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience.

El Hierro is not any volcanic island. For centuries, it was considered prime meridian before being replaced by Greenwich Mean Time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. This occurred after the United Kingdom had standardised the measurement of time for the rest of the planet in 1840 via the Great Western Railway company. El Hierro, sitting halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents Western media’s powerful grid, which rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.

Diversity, art and music come together on this day of festivities and vindication, in which Radio 3 sets up in the Nouvel Building Courtyard to offer a line-up of artists who will perform live —streamed on the Radio 3 website — without interruption from 7am to 10pm. The day will conclude with upbeat music in the Sabatini Building Garden from 9pm to midnight.

Omona! is an event which hosts K-pop choreographies and examines thought around this global phenomenon. K-pop, meaning Korean pop, is ever-present the world over, the fine detail of its choreographies, its frenzied music videos and its ultra-mastered sound production some of the hallmarks of this revision of boy bands and girl groups. The encounter sees choreographer and art historian Natalia de Val put forward an analysis of this cultural movement, followed by an event in which assorted dance groups will perform covers of their favourite bands.

This encounter pays tribute to Charlie Parker and Benny Harris’s classic Ornithology, and brings together two figures from Galicia who are both distinguished in their respective spheres: storyteller Quico Cadaval and jazz saxophonist Pablo Castaño.