Live Arts

This programme, coinciding with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride, does not look to “thematise” a pathological situation. Rather, it sets out to demonstrate the power of admitting we ourselves are fragile and vulnerable, together with other lives shaken by persecution and exile. Nor does it seek to moralise on the positions and practices outside the norm, vindicating a greater capacity for agency of and over our bodies and sexual impulses, developed here through plastic, poetic, written and performative devices. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.  

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.

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.

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.