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.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents, in a collaboration with the Oslo Biennial (2019–2024), Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project in which people from different countries learn books of their choice by heart. Together they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated points, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.  

Between August and September 2015, Pablo Sanz conducted fieldwork in the Amanã and Mamirauá reserves in Brazil’s central Amazon. These recordings make up the material that forms entangled, a project that folds out into a series of multi-channel, ambisonic installations, events and concerts adapted to the place in which they are set up. 

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — 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.  

ESTUDIO in Conversation is an encounter which makes up part of the second edition of ESTUDIO, “Half Said, Unsaid”, a programme which brings together the enquiries of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.  

For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies.

Llorenç Barber (Aielo de Malferit, 1948), one of the major reference points in sound experimentation, is the focus of the Museo Reina Sofía’s reacquaintance with live music in an open-air concert for “flying bells” that make the Doppler effect audible as they swing.

Eden, Eden, Eden could be seen as a dramaturgy, in which characters’ movements are sketched on a feverish set. Everything seems to be there for somebody to choreograph the type of unique phrase which happens in a seemingly unique stage space. The Choreography is executed with reading.   

In a proposal by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network), Museo Situado, a network of collaboration between different collectives from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and Museo Reina Sofía, has organised this new edition of Situated Voices as part of the 8 March demonstrations.

With 8M on the horizon, two key questions have led Bolivian artist, writer and activist María Galindo to develop a performance in the Museo: What are our horizons in feminist struggle? What or from where do we speak about when we are situated as feminists?

As part of the performing arts series staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents An Evening of Solo Works by choreographer Meg Stuart. Upon the conclusion of the performance, the artist will participate in a conversation, presented and moderated by Isabel de Naverán.

As part of her European tour, trans sudaca activist Susy Shock and her group Bandada de Colibríes (Flock of Hummingbirds) will perform a concert in the Museo Reina Sofía, coinciding with the release of their latest album Traviarca. Traviarca is a neologism alluding to that transvestite which, due to their experience and wisdom, is respected by their equals and community..

As part of the series of performing arts staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents #LOSMICRÓFONOS (#THEMICROPHONES) by Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol.

This encounter, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía, welcomes poets Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and artist Susan Bee, all with close ties to the Language poetry movement, to perform readings and present their past and present work, as well as engage in conversation with the attending audience.

The 1936 coup d’état and the ensuing civil war splintered reality, the pieces scattering across complex [in]exiles, disappearances, silences… faltering and inconclusive narratives, fertile, multifocal and widespread memories that pulse and throb today, cross-examining the present and managing to distort a univocal, hegemonic gaze.

The Museo Reina Sofía opens a call to register for the performance piece Udlot Udlot, by José Maceda, in the areas surrounding the Palacio de Cristal. The call is aimed at anyone interested in music and does not require knowledge of music theory.

As part of the performing arts series staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents, over two sessions, Corbeaux (Crows), by choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen. Upon the conclusion of the session on Tuesday 2 July, the artist and some of the dancers from the company Compagnie O will engage in an open conversation, presented and moderated by Isabel de Naverán, with the audience. 

The film Estado de malestar (State of Malaise, 2019) by artist María Ruido sets forth an analysis of the malaise and illnesses stemming from capitalism in the information age. 

As part of the performing arts series held in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Mix-en-scene (2015), by choreographer and dancer Amaranta Velarde and artist and creative technologist Alba G. Corral.