Live Arts

Songs of the Contemporary Social War II is a project carried out inside the framework of the exhibition Pedro G. Romero. Verse-Composing Machines and comprises a large-scale installation and stage design conceived by Pedro G. Romero as a form of improvised square where live musical performances unfold. Inside these musical pieces, songs that Guy Debord, Alice Becker-Ho and other situationists wrote about Spain in the transition to democracy are performed and have been recovered by this artist and researcher.

For the second year, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

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.

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.

Forms of sexual dissidence have always inhabited dislocated spaces and strange times, yet they still connect life paths in seemingly diverse places and temporalities. The programme through which the Museo Reina Sofía contributes to LGTBIQ+ 2021 Pride seeks to address the violence, complexities and contradictions of the present by hearing multiple voices and acting as a platform and speaker for bodies in struggles.

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía participates in the annual International Museum Day —celebrated internationally since 1977 — under the 2021 slogan proposed by ICOM (the International Council of Museums) of “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”, and thus prompts a reconsideration of the idea of a living, open institution.

Meta Music Machines is a research project which seeks to develop and build a digitally automated composer, a machine-sculpture that produces new sound creations, recombining information extracted from music indexed in different sound archives. Oscar Martín’s work in progress had adopted, over time, different formats and names, according to the spheres of artistic and research-based creation in which it is displayed.

They Wanted Arms but People Arrived is a radio series and theatre piece on migration and domestic work, written and performed by women from the Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory) association and featuring the participation of sound artist Susana Jiménez Carmona and the work cooperative Pandora Mirabilia.

The two volumes of Theremonial (Beat Generation, 2017 and 2019) see Javier Díez Ena pay homage to the timbre of the theremin, a musical instrument, invented in 1919 by Russian musician Lev Termen, with a sound customarily associated with US horror film and sci-fi scores from the 1950s or as an ominous addition in relatively traditional pop music creations.

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 a collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the Spanish premiere of Scorpion and Felix, a work by Buenos Aires-based La Columna Durruti, an iconoclastic collective carrying out performance actions and made up of Emilio García Wehbi, Maricel Álvarez, Marcelo Martínez, Julieta Potenze, Martín Antuña, among others.

Songs of the Contemporary Social War is the title of a pamphlet made by Guy Debord, signed anonymously under the pseudonym “Some iconoclasts” and dated May 1981.