Activities

The exhibition Machinations traces the influence of the machine concept developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in contemporary art within the context following May ’68 in France. Pivotal to putting together the show has been the research work of a scientific committee made up of philosophers Gerald Raunig and Stevphen Shukaitis and cultural theorist Brigitta Kuster. In this round-table discussion, moderated by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, each guest will present their research. 

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges. This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience.

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.

This lecture by Enzo Traverso pivots around his latest book Revolution. An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021) in which he addresses the genealogy of the “revolution” concept and its multiple uses, giving rise to dialectic constellations from intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Aleksandra Kolontái and Auguste Blanqui and exploring the connection between their lines of theory and the existential realities they were developed within, and without averting the gaze from the aesthetic expressions that emerged in parallel with these revolutions, in addition to their relationship with time, oscillating incessantly between past and future, memory and utopia.

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.

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Bachelor’s Degree in Art at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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. 

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.

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. 

The 24^th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 23 and 24 February 2023. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

This congress analyses the different levels and dynamics of confrontation employed by forms of militarised communication on their path to permeating social life and manipulating the collective experience of the present.

This conversation, open to the public, explores the tradition of literary analysis from a social perspective in a Hispanic context, welcoming three speakers and a moderator from university institutions and the sphere of publishing to discuss this key book in the tradition of Spanish literature.

Since December 2022, via the programme Perturbable School II, seminars on political violence and institutions, the work of Margarita Azurdia, and other situated voices, this Temporary Intensity Zone raises questions around the illness and healing of the institutions that shape us and the bodies with which we traverse and make them.

The sinking of the Prestige in 2002 demonstrated how the majority of contemporary environmental disasters give rise to significant mobilisations of mutual aid and demands in the places where they occur. In this four-day encounter, different researchers, artists, activists and citizens reflect on the relations between ecology, memory and democracy today. The programme revolves around four axes: environmental traditions stretching from the anti-Francoist struggle to the present; memory and citizen creativity following the Prestige oil spill; authoritarian threats that loom from the depletion of fossil fuels; and controversies around imaginable futures.

This lecture sees Ferreira da Silva examine contemporary works and artistic practices which call into question that which she calls the “transparent I”, a concept which references the modern subject hailing from the Enlightenment and customarily adopted in the position of spectator.

Architecture and medicine have always been closely linked. Theories about body and mind traverse architectural discourse, turning the figure of the architect into a kind of doctor, the client into a patient. Every era has its different conditions, each one requiring its own architecture.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites Alexandra T. Vázquez, an associate professor of NYU’s Institute of Performing Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts, to participate in its programme of master lectures. The programme for this edition includes a seminar and a lecture concerning music’s relationship with different experiences, objects and spaces, and also the methods, modes and approaches around what we feel we know about the visual.

Twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige, this Temporary Intensity Zone calls upon the collective potential of a self-organised citizenry facing the life-threatening side of environmental disaster.

This seminar reflects on how performative artistic practices are inserted inside a collection and its institutional framework. To spark this debate, an approach is set forth from different perspectives — theory, practice and ethics — convening voices from inside and outside the museum as an institution. A series of lectures and events with different artists, theorists, curators and researchers brings together different viewpoints and reflections around working conditions with performative works of art.

This TIZ reflects on ghostly relationships, the relationships of events with history, of citizens with politics, of inhabitants with the home or of the missing with those still waiting for them. In the month of the dead, we think about mourning and lamenting, memory and forgetting, and forms of presence and disappearance from the unique spectrality which the same idea of a museum imposes upon us.

The Chair of Situated Thought sets out to articulate different experiences, stances, methods and initiatives of critical thought as it seeks to underscore the singularities of an intellectual and artistic production that converses with social and political circumstances, and which aspires to have an impact on the specific conditions of its environment.

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.

The Neighbourhood Picnic constitutes an annual opportunity to create a space where Lavapiés (Madrid) residents can come together in the Museo’s Garden. A place for everyone and part of the daily life of the neighbourhood in which it is situated.  

Slumil K’ajxemk’op — which means “rebel land” in Tzotzil, a Mayan dialect — is how the Zapatista delegation renamed Europe during its visit to the continent in 2021. A gift for being aware of and recognising ourselves as part of another Europe “abducted” from itself, and which invites us to reinvent our ties to the past in an emancipatory mode of expression, to the point of returning our otherness to us: the non-suppressed condition.

This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties. 

Bioliteratures 1 is conceived as a series of sessions in which writing forms converge around authors whose careers defy distances between subject and language, between the self and us, between the public and the private. For this first session, made up of two round-table discussions, the literary work of Rafael Chirbes, which speaks to us of disarticulated and violent nature intrinsically constituting our times, has been selected.

Four decades on from the Rompente collective’s disbandment, this encounter is organised to reflect and work upon the historical significance of this community of artists, poets, musicians and likeminded figures, and upon the collective’s memory, forms of artistic production and political by-products.

Political matter requires a non-dissociation of art and politics with regard to artisan work, and modes of occupying time and the relationship it articulates. 

This spring, different forms of reading, writing practices and literature gain prominence in the Museo with a second Temporary Intensity Zone (TIZ) opening under the title, aligned with the ideas of poet and historian Ángel González, Escribir sin tener ni idea (Writing With No Idea). This programme looks to explore how words, narrative, can expand beyond literature and towards new territories of artistic creation and reflection of thought in the contemporary world.

In this encounter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood present the key aspects of the exhibition From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett, curated by both, in a survey on graphic art’s potential during historical avant-garde movements. 

The 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration and supported by MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 24 and 25 February 2022. As an international encounter it sets out to share and debate experiences and research, open new channels of study and reflect upon the institutional management of conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

Over the past six years, the Southern Conceptualisms Network and Museo Reina Sofía have joined forces to arrange this periodic encounter, which stems from the common sentiment of the need to urgently strike up a dialogue between spaces where memory gestates. This fourth edition, under the title Archives to Come, calls upon imaginative powers underlying archive practices and thought and the way in which they are capable of proposing alterations to the dominant temporalities limiting the construction of other chronologies, the seed of different futures.  

This new edition analyses the presence of architecture in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive, a repository of memory containing, in fragments, the history of the institution: its origins as a hospital of neoclassicism, its role during the Spanish Civil War as a field hospital, its transformation into an art centre and its expansion as an international museum. Various landmarks that enable a micro history of civil and public architecture to be traced from the 18th century to the present day, but without losing sight of the process of configuration and the idea of what a museum must be.