We Speak for Our Difference
LGTBIQ+ Programme
The Museo Reina Sofía’s alignment with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride is based on the archive, tracing the footsteps of experiences which have been systematically banished from collective memory. By focusing on lived and artistic experiences that take form from repression and exclusion, the Museo’s own work on memory and archive can be rethought, thereby questioning the underpinnings of both the institution and the bedrock of our society: who we are and who we want to be.
This programme convenes highly divergent affections and degrees of intensity, outlined from equally different voices and contexts, expressed through pain, anger, delirium, pride, and even nostalgia. Yet despite this disparity, they all share common ground in the utterance of difference, an implacable difference that decries and rebels against violence in processes of standardisation and homogenisation, to which the art institution is not extraneous.
The intention is to explore every layer of the Museo, from its programme of exhibitions and public activities to the interventions at the heart of the Collection. Groups of reflection and debate will also be set up, moving beyond Pride Week so as to expand the institution’s commitment to LGTBIQ+ demands and assertions across the year.
This work of memory and archive, which evokes at once processes of struggle and imagination and thought, questions our past from the present, taking the words and bodies of those who, not just during Pride but on a daily basis, speak for our difference.