Activities

This open day sees members of the Queer Malaise study group — developed in the Museo across September and October 2022 — share with those in attendance their experience-based and carnal, as well as intellectual and creative, exploration in the preceding weeks.

This fresh edition of the Free Unions programme invites Guatemalan artist Benvenuto Chavajay to carry out the performance Returning Souls (Popol Vuh [Wuj]). With the aim of activating memory to translate and transcribe the silence of his ancestors, Chavajay looks to “make Guatemala’s soul return by means of the healing and dignifying role of art, thereby bringing justice to history,” in his words.

Violence pervades queer people, who constantly face barriers to social structures which hinder and constrain the development of subjectivity and the free expression of affections and desires. In an era of widespread malaise, this vulnerability intensifies, often leading to a downward spiral of solitude, pathologisation and victimisation that is hard to evade. Queer Malaise seeks to share and politicise these situations, which isolate people and single them out, through tools that include dialogue, narration, make-up, performance and the collective production of images.

Cerdas (Sows) depicts the problems and consequences that materialise when body worship fails. By way of a series of scenes and seemingly unconnected “re-performances”, Carlos García de la Vega, Rodrigo García Marina and Rocío Simón show the violence inherent in certain regulated spaces that prevent queer corporality.

This day of lectures and encounters, the fourth instalment of the series organised by the inter-university group TURICOM, endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. By virtue of a selection of brief lectures and a final conversation, followed by a debate, it looks to reflect on mass tourism and the way in which, as the industry of experience, it is connected to the search for a lived experience that has shaped contemporary art.

This fourth edition, concerning the relationship between coloniality and gender, tries to reflect on certain feminist approaches which manifest a posture of moral, authoritaria and exclusivist superiority, characteristics of the patriarchal episteme. This programme, in charge of Rita Segato and Elisa Fuenzalida — the director and coordinator of the Chair, respectively —, includes a seminar in which local transfeminist activists participate.

This second edition presents the artistic and political pathway taken by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, founded in Peru in 1971, and highlights some of the key moments in their long history to spark debates that remain present in Peruvian and Latin American cultural contexts, and in Spanish and European spheres.

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. 

Across six sessions, the study group Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities seeks to investigate alternative models in cultural and art theory, and in artistic practices, which radically challenge the relationship between animals and humans.  

This lecture series, the third instalment organised by the interuniversity group TURICOM — which is part of the project Paradoxical Modernity: Artistic and Tourist Experience in Developmentalist Spain (1959–1975), PGC2018-093422-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) — endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. . More specifically, this new edition centres on the concept of ruin as a centre of attraction for cultural habits and practices inside the sphere of tourism.

In this inaugural edition of the Expanded Theatricalities Chair, the work and ideas of composer and director Heiner Goebbels (Germany, 1952) engage in dialogue with the proposals of artists María Jerez, Pablo Palacio and Silvia Zayas, continuing the debate on expanded theatricalities in these times of Anthropocene crisis — one that can also be considered a crisis of the insurgence of matter, following the ideas of Suely Rolnik. 

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.

What would happen if we thought of care as a job? What is stopping us from thinking that way? What is gained and what is lost? Why don’t those who provide care have the right to rest, retire and receive payment? Why does this activity remain marginalised from the productive, the public and the visible? And what if we thought and wrote about rights, payment and the relationships of bodies that gestate and support?

Pan-Pan Kolektiva sets out from the hypothesis that the current situation is giving rise to collective trauma and from the following question: Do we have the necessary tools to listen to each other or do we need to create new ones?