Activities

To mark the 16^th edition of Book Night, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre present a new poem by artist Eduardo Scala entitled INSTANTeTERNO (INSTANT and ETERNAL), written for this occasion.

Tomàs Llorens (1936–2021), a key figure of art history and Spain’s museum landscape, passed away on 10 June this year in Dénia. His professional activity was decisive in founding the most salient modern art museums in Spain at the beginning of the democratic period. This homage features a pre-eminent selection of interventions — both in-person and online – by figures linked to curatorship, art history, architecture and fine arts, all of which are representative of the professional and intellectual interests of Tomàs Llorens.

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.   

This international seminar prompts passage from violence and fear to the community of affection (“to be affected by” and “to affect”), drawing on social activism, artistic creation and critical thought to range across sensibility, language, bodies, imagination and politics.

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. 

But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others. Film and Indigenous Lives encompasses a broad chronological arc that spans from 1970 to 2020, from the indiscriminate massacre known in Latin America as ethnocide to the Zapatista delegation’s recent journey from the Chiapas jungle to Europe’s major cities; a journey which seeks to rediscover models of co-existence and good living for a worn-out West.

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.

At the confluence of art and activism, this workshop looks to cast a critical gaze on the representation of bodies, sexuality and gender in a clear confrontation with restrictions imposed by society, laws and religions. Over the course of three three-hour sessions in the company of illustrator and activist Zainab Fasiki, participants will collectively produce a fanzine.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s annual summer cinema returns once again, focusing this year on rediscovering a central part of African cinema which, by way of the strength of its fiction, challenges the images with which the West tries to invade it.

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.

This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions.

This encounter sees feminist illustrator Zainab Fasiki (Fez, 1994), writer Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) — both participants in and advocates of L’amour fait loi — and writer Najat El Hachmi (Nador, 1979), author of the novel On Monday We Will Be Loved, discuss the protests that have arisen in Morocco through the increasingly frequent actions in defence of sexual rights. They also look at the need for other accounts and imaginaries that reflect the complexity, diversity and richness of Morocco’s intimate territory and its diaspora, habitually accounted for and represented with the simplification and reductionism exuded by the colonial and exoticizing gaze.

New trans* feminism, anti-colonial and non-binary struggles, incorporated by different bodies and generations, have undoubtedly resignified the meaning of queer, just as positions reclaiming a new normal have been reformulated.

Harvest 2021, therefore, sets out a debate and reflection around publishing and producing photobooks, inviting people immersed in the layout phase of a project to share their photographic works with the other participants.

A group of feminist lawyers, journalists and producers formed the observer brigade Open the Gates! in May 2021, with the aim of documenting and granting visibility to the work and living situation of numerous female day labourers, both local and seasonal migrant workers.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía organises a visit to the exhibition Vivian Suter, led by the artist herself, which includes the screening of the film Vivian’s Garden (2017), directed by Rosalind Nashashibi.

This encounter gets under way with an artist-led guided tour around the exhibition Charlotte Johannesson. Take Me to Another World, ending in a conversation between Johannesson, Patricia Molins and Mabel Tapia. 

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.

Criba , an artist’s book published by PEZPLATA Ediciones (2021), straddles the graphic and the poetic, the showing and the naming. This encounter sees artist Laura Lio and poet Ada Salas strike up a dialogue between the written image and the painted word, processes that sit at the centre of the publication, expounding their creative and publishing-based undertaking.

As a medicine cabinet well stocked with first aid material, the project looks to delve deeper into the conception of care with the help of ideas and useful resources to identify what is good for us collectively and to open pathways that allow us to live differently. All of this is mutually understood with the knowledge, particularly migrant knowledge, and experiences of people who inhabit this collectiveness in the search for a multicultural community neighbourhood with shared future perspectives.

El Picnic del barrio es, para l+s vecin+s de Lavapiés (Madrid), una celebración del estar juntas y del hacer solidario que caracteriza la vida en el barrio. La iniciativa, que tuvo su primera edición en junio de 2018, adquiere en esta ocasión una especial connotación de reencuentro.

To mark the end of the documentary exhibition The Weight of Form. The Graphic Design of Carlos Cruz-Diez, the Museo Reina Sofía organises Modern South, a conversation which, starting from Carlos Cruz-Diez’s graphic and publishing work, explores different areas related to graphic art in Venezuela, comparing it to events in other Latin American countries, in addition to the subsequent evolution of graphic design in the region. 

Soledad Liaño, curator of Ida Applebroog. Marginalias, leads a tour around the said exhibition, taking selected readings from the artist’s diary, to be recited publicly for the first time alongside her visual work by actress Nuria Mencía.

This new edition of Situated Voices puts forward, in line with its format as an assembly-based, horizontal forum bringing together experiences, involvement in and knowledge of today’s pressing issues, a conversation on remittances from a feminist viewpoint, situating the focus on the crossreads between migration, the unequal division of jobs, care, and the role of women inside this cross-border logic.

The year 2019 marked eighty years since the start of Republican exile, framed in the context of a global migration crisis and with clear parallels between the new and old fields of the displaced in Europe. The memory of Iberian diaspora thus became part of a much larger history of displacement and return, a history which did not begin with the Civil War, did not end in the Transition to democracy in Spain, and does not have Spaniards as the sole protagonists. This lecture takes up this synchrony to consider new relationship modes with Republican exiles.

What does remembering the ethical, aesthetic and political experiences of Republican exiles mean eighty years later within the global context of the climate emergency and migrant crisis? By way of these premises, this seminar, conducted by lecturer and researcher Germán Labrador Méndez, sets forth a discussion around certain points in time from Spain’s stateless archive as it seeks to establish moments of rupture, in which the destituent powers and the utopian potential of diasporic experience are expounded.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council, present a retrospective on Luke Fowler (Glasgow, 1978), a celebrated British artist, film-maker and musician. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, Fowler explores the relationship between subject and archive, memory and history through the possibilities afforded by experimental cinema.

In this encounter, Hanan Dalouh Amghar, Maggie Schmitt and three activists from northern Morocco they met on their trip will discuss the situation of the feminist movement in the context of present-day Morocco, exploring issues, leading figures, disputes and challenges and placing the stress on the diversity of initiatives, priorities and practices, and on the different realities of country and city, centre and periphery.

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.

This audiovisual series pivots on cinema’s future imagining with films made between 1920 and 2020, an historical expanse of one hundred years in which the future is manifested as an idea at odds with progress conceived as dogma, as a radical critique of the present, and as a yearning for new worlds. What are the imagined futures in the past and which future is projected and desired in our present? 

This second edition sees artist Carme Nogueira share her art-making as she revisits, with a group of Museo Reina Sofía workers, her project Tenerife (2020), in which she engages in dialogue with the homonymous 1932 film by Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar, who both worked with Luis Buñuel on the documentary Las Hurdes. Land without Bread (1933).

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.

Women’s right to decide and the struggles for reproductive and sexual rights have formed one of the channels of articulation for feminisms, and are currently configured as a driving force that imbues debates with vitality and generates new energies. This debate looks at different political, organisational, technological and mutual support strategies for feminist movements, as well as contributing to reflecting and constructing feminist thought by activisms in different territories; namely, in Argentina, Poland, Italy, El Salvador and Spain.

This new edition analyzes the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles — directed by poet Abdellatif Laâbi, it brought together the most relevant voices in poetry, art and thought from post-colonial Maghreb from 1966 until it was banned at the beginning of 1972.

In this Humanities Series, Marco Baravalle, Ferran Barenblit, Manuel Borja-Villel, Timothy Morton, Nelly Richard and Hito Steyerl all outline their reflections around rethinking forms of cultural production and institutions as spaces that extend beyond representation is inescapable.

In conjunction with the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 (from 31 March to 27 September 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises Between So Many, a conversation between artists Safaa Erruas, Karim Rafi and Younes Rahmoun and the show’s curator, Abdellah Karroum, who will moderate and activate the debate.

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.

On March 16 and 17, 2021, the 22nd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference will be held, organized by the Department of Conservation-Restoration of the Reina Sofía Museum, with the support of the Mapfre Foundation.

A lecture by art historian Ariel Jiménez, the curator of the exhibition The Weight of Form. The Graphic Design of Carlos Cruz-Diez, will shed light on one of the artist’s most prolific but lesser-known sides: his output in the field of graphic design, where he played a key role in the development of Venezuela’s publishing industry.

This conversation between people with first-person trans* experiences, their families and their environments seeks to situate the specific demands of the collectives involved, and to understand the key parts to this future law and the problems underlying the controversies it provokes.