Activities

This latest edition includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter.

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.

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.

In her recent publications, art historian and curator Antonia Majaca has focused her research on the relations between the development of algorithmic computing regimes and their potential to build subjectivity. This lecture sees Majaca analyse the historical construction of optical regimes found at the root of Western cosmologies in studies on how the history of Western geology has been shaped, considering that such regimes of the gaze are found at the base of contemporary computational paradigms.

Museo Situado organises, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía’s Conservation and Restoration and Artwork Registration Departments, a new edition of the Course on Handling, Packing, Transporting and Installing Cultural Heritage Artefacts. The aim is to give people with migrant life stories from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood some insight into how artworks are handled and exhibitions are installed.

In its fifth edition, the Neighbourhood Picnic transforms, once again, the Museo Reina Sofía, turning it into a space of encounter, enjoyment and resistance for all residents of Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.

In this lecture, Equatoguinean writer, intellectual and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo traces a literary journey on the history of Equatorial Guinea, from the era of Spanish colonisation to its independence and subsequent evolution towards an authoritarian regime and its experience of diaspora.

This edition of Documents surveys the lesser-examined side of Pablo Picasso: as a poet. The visual, sound and performance quality of his poetry is deepened in the dialogue between text, sound and image, elements that form the backbone of the activity, structured around a performance recital of a selection of poems — with a new Spanish translation by Jèssica Jaques Pi — followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an editor and expert in Picasso’s literary work, and members of the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The Indonesian art collective Taring Padi organises the workshop Activating Resistance with wayang kardus with a view to sharing one of its most distinctive artistic and political unrest techniques: the creation of wayang kardus, recycled cardboard puppets inspired by the rod and shadow puppets characteristic of traditional Indonesian theatre.

Italian artists Yervant Gianikian (Merano, 1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Rome, 1942–2018) are both pivotal figures in avant-garde cinema, their work centred on films and filmic, compilation-based installations which explore the twentieth-century’s major wars and the ideologies that occasion them. This programme is a retrospective with the catastrophe of war as its fulcrum and includes the international premiere of the artists’ last film Frente a Guernica (In Front of Guernica, 2023).

Joseph Morder (Trinidad and Tobago, 1949) is a film-maker and diarist whose Super-8 films are a monument to experimentation and film as a way of life. This programme, comprising three, single-screening sessions, unveils three of his films on the city of Madrid and its people, neighbourhoods, history and lives: Niños, niñas (Malasaña) (Boys, Girls [Malasaña], 1978), L’Été madrilène (The Madrid Summer, 1978) and La Gran Vía de Rita Jones (The Gran Vía of Rita Jones, 1996). The film-maker will be in attendance at all three screenings.

Opposite the capitalist concept of the city as a financial centre or tourist park built for consumerism, Situated Voices 28 seeks to articulate the foundations, from collectiveness, to reformulate concepts of property and belonging in relation to public space. In looking for the answers to these questions, this encounter is set out as a space for sharing experiences, tools and neighbourhood actions which search for channels of collective transformation.

The first civilian casualties of the first documented aerial attacks since the invention of aviation were recorded in 1912. In her work Unending Lightning, artist Cristina Lucas employs an audiovisual device to locate on a map and trace all aerial bombings that have caused the loss of civilian lives from that year to the present. 

An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.

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.

This lecture sees Patricia Saldarriaga set out the premise that although zombies can be considered representatives of otherness, they can also be seen as a result of necropolitics.

In memory of Carlos Saura (1932–2023), this programme screens two films: Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk, 2022), the film-maker’s final work centred on artistic impulses that extend from pre-historic cave painting to contemporary graffiti, and Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry! 1980), one of Saura’s early films and a major landmark in his oeuvre.

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.

Utopias and Revolts. Composing Strategies from the Collective is a series of encounters which, from a public round table and different work sessions, reflects upon strategies to deal with present-day challenges related to eco-social crises and sustaining life. Therefore, collectives and associations involved in social movements that include transfeminism, rights (domestic workers, housing, care, sexual rights), the struggles of migrant people, and other movements, are brought together here.

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.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid bring into focus Narimane Mari (Algeria, 1969) in this film series, which includes the international premiere of her latest film S'il etait une fois (If Once Upon a Time, 2023), three live music sessions, presentations of different films and a conversation with the artist and film-maker.

Epiphyte is a project, nurtured by the cultural association Side Thinkers and directed by Vanesa Viloria, which investigates new forms of facing the eco-social crisis by observing the plant world as a way to learn of other ways of life, community and future. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Pollinating (Con)tact, a programme structured around two artistic proposals and two conversations with agents and professionals linked to environmental humanities, artistic creation, science and climate activism.

The Museo Reina Sofía, alongside the Wikimedia España Association, seeks to incorporate Wikipedia’s philosophy of shared knowledge into different modes of making and rethinking the museum. Within the framework of this collaboration, the publishing workshop The History of the Lavapiés Neighbourhood on Wikipedia is organised with a collaborative network of neighbourhood collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés area.

The Territorial Re-existences Lab is an encounter which, with Colombian researchers and activists Lavinia Fiori and Libia Grueso, and presented by Carmen Haro and moderated by Josimar Castillo and Elisa Fuenzalida from Redes por el clima (Networks for Climate), aims to pool the strategic visions, conceptual tools and narratives to deal with the climate crisis.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre, in collaboration with hablarenarte, put forward a family-oriented illustration workshop with Olga de Dios. Through the use of spray as a pictorial tool — combined with other more traditional tools like the paint brush — the workshop addresses issues such as creative fear, managing mistakes, the development of imagination and the experience of collective work.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre bring forward World Book Day to 21 April to participate in the BookCrossing initiative of other Spanish museums and cultural centres. The initiative is about “freeing” a series of books in different public spaces, in this case in the Museo and its surrounding areas. Anyone can take these books home to, once read, repeat the action.

Anthropologists Francisco Ferrándiz and Rossana Reguillo engage in dialogue on the presence of necropolitics as a form of managing death and administering life in different territories and landscapes: from modern-day Mexico to Francoist Spain, passing through other places which, in being permanently subjected to extractivist violence, are known as sacrifice zones. 

Situated outside academic frameworks, these investigations pick up the legacy of workers’ co-research from the 1960s, feminist epistemologies and theories of research-action. Therefore, more than establishing a method, they seek to generate devices in order for social struggles to read each other and find causes that lead to action. 

In conjunction with the exhibition Margarita Azurdia. Margarita Rita Rica Dinamita, this encounter explores the Central American artist Margarita Azurdia’s (Guatemala, 1931–1988). The encounter in the Museo comprises a tour through the exhibition, led by its coordinator Beatriz Jordana, interweaving voices and echoes superimposed in the different rooms of the show, a selection of the artist’s poems chosen by the show’s curator.

Queer L.E. The First Queer Literature Encounter is a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. The sessions are articulated from different places such as prose, research and critical thinking, a juncture for words to transcend books and reach bodies around a community of readers, activists, writers and LGTBIAQ+ people.

This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.

A number of pre-eminent film-makers like Jean Vigo, François Truffaut and Abbas Kiarostami have made films about childhood, but few have forged such a coherent body of work as Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007). Keko, a peerless film-maker who made eleven fictional features between 1972 and 1984 in Albania, explored the challenges, frustrations and aspirations of children. This retrospective, the first in Spain and one of the few organised internationally, includes four of her — recently restored — films, screened in double sessions.

This TIZ addresses the problem areas that approach ecology from relationality. Interactions, relations of intimacy and mutual support, forms of collective intelligence, shared knowledge, involvement in protesting against climate change and community learning are some of the concepts that define the activities, activations, investigations and accompaniments from April through to July in the Museo.

This fresh edition of Interval presents El agua (Water, 2022), a feature film by Elena López Riera (Spain, 1982), accompanied by Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), a short film on the ritual and attraction of daily rural life. López Riera, with a filmography straddling gruesome realism and magical thinking, has established herself as one of the most original voices in new Spanish cinema. 

Inside the Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023 programme, and in one unique session, Guernica: el último exiliado (Guernica: The Last Exile) is screened, a documentary film centred on the iconic mural’s arrival in Spain seven months after the coup d’état attempt in 1981. In this instance, it is presented by its director, Guillermo Logar, and features a conversation with Genoveva Tussell and Álvaro Martínez-Novillo.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

In recent months, citizen demonstrations have exposed the dismal situation felt, for a number of years now, in the rooms of hospitals and medical centres across the Spanish State: public healthcare is in danger. Its clear demise, resulting from the progressive neglect of the country’s public authorities since the economic crisis in 2008, has intensified since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately damaging the pillars of a public model recognised the world over.

Project 30. Sketches of Heights is a site-specific performance which reflects, through a collective footprint and oral storytelling, on the memory of women during Franco’s dictatorship. It stems from research — conducted in Madrid during July of 2022 — into thirty women who explored the body at once as a wound and as a territory of resistance.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ongoing programme of film premieres, Intervals, shows recent works made either during the year in progress or the previous one. This fresh edition is devoted to Charlotte Wells (Scotland, 1987), 2022’s standout film-maker for her debut feature Aftersun (2022), a beautiful and melancholy reflection on family relationships, the real and imaginary dimension of memories and the passing of time.

In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.

Setting out from the exhibition Evil Eye: The Parallel History of Optics and Ballistics, held at Tabakalera Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea (Donostia-San Sebastián), this seminar aims to trace a history of the development of modern technology, punctuating ideas around vision and cognition.