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Armando Montesinos, curator of the exhibition, explains in this interview the keys of Idea: Painting-Force. The works of Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manolo Quejido, dating from 1978 to 1984, comprise the proposal put forward in the exhibition in Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro. They carried out this activity at the height of the crisis affecting the modern movement and the idea of the avant-garde. Plus, they were working in Spain, in a setting that, on the hinge between the 70s and the 80s, was experiencing some newly-arrived democratic liberties and whose artistic scene had derived from the dominant acritical formalism to the emergence of the market and the aesthetics of success.

On June 19th, to mark the opening of the exhibition ± I96I Founding the Expanded Arts, the following performances were put on, with contribution from Simoni Forti: Huddle, Platforms, Slant Board, Accompaniment For Sound and Censor; all of them dating from 1961.

± I96I presents the first detailed analysis of the decisive year in the 1960s that led to the invention of the “expansion of the arts”. The exhibition looks at the origins of the change, the experimental activity and the earliest collective actions that pointed to the beginning of an unprecedented expansion of the notion of “composition” and soon generated a multidisciplinary project that took place in real time/simultaneously over the course of that year.

The curators of this exhibition, Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec, explain in this video some of the keys to understand why 1961 was a decisive year that led to the invention of the “expansion of the arts”. The exhibition looks at the origins of the change, the experimental activity and the earliest collective actions that pointed to the beginning of an unprecedented expansion of the notion of “composition” and soon generated a multidisciplinary project that took place in real time/simultaneously over the course of that year.

Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933 - Rio de Janeiro, 2014) is an essential name in Latin American documentary film. His work is shaped by political issues but manages to avoid demagogy, as he addresses the everyday lives and subjectivities of marginal majorities with a sensibility not altered by melodrama. He was interviewed on the occasion of the film and video series Eduardo Coutinho. Retrospective, held at Museo Reina Sofía between February and April 2013.

The educational program Sound familiar?, for children and accompanying adults, consists of an interactive visit through some of the rooms of the Collection. It was designed by Pablo Martín Jones and is also performed by him, along with Raúl Márquez and David Escudero. Sound familiar? This activity is an educational and artistic project that offers a musical interpretation of certain pictorial works of the second and fourth floor of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, in order to explore sensibilities other than the exclusively visual approach to different works of art.

Reinventing Space marks the inauguration of a new initiative in which young artists collaborate with the Museum in creating workshops designed for children. Exhibitions by Yayoi Kusama, Lygia Pape and Elena Asins serve as the context and material for the workshop.

What is the role of video in relation to the art institution? What paths and currents has video followed between its arrival and the current situation in Spain? This video comments on the program Video era. Setting and potential (80-00), held at the end of May 2011, which seeks to answer such questions, with a combined format of debate and screenings on four different dates.

Structured around various core ideas, this interview with the author of the book Modernismo después de la postmodernidad (2011) shows the dilemmas arising between a revision of the melancholic and contemplative past, returned in the form of the architectural memorial, and a critical reading from the museum, in which history and memory are confronted. Huyssen discusses the foundations of a new modernism, which has future prospects and projects but lacks a geographical centre and power hierarchies.

For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past. Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection) represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration.