Activities

The colonial-capitalist regime’s micropolitical principle is the abuse of vital forces in all elements of the biosphere — including, naturally, the human element.

Affection in Re-Existence is a project developed by the research group Situated Feminisms, associated with the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre and made up of researchers Elisa Fuenzalida and Jeannette Tineo.  

The work of Charles Ray (Chicago, 1953), one of most renowned sculptors in specialised critique, addresses the phantasmagorical quality of reality. The artist sets out from a questioning of sculpture making, translating daily experiences, memories and contemporary subjects into statuary.

On this occasion, the programme shines a light on cases in Spain and the Southern Cone of South America, starting, firstly, with the unveiling of the exhibition Incomplete Times. Chile, the First Neoliberal Laboratory, in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre (from 21 March to 24 May 2019), and the guided tour by its curator, Nelly Richard.

Feminisms is a publication by L’Internationale online, with its point of departure from the diverse situated perspectives interwoven into movements such as ecofeminism and xenofeminism.

An analysis of the relationships of feminism across history, its affirmation as a political approach after the 2017 struggles and its impact on current transformations of capitalism form the aim of this lecture.

Across a large part of the planet, the feminist movement is inexorably rising to the fore in the transformation of political action and in the postulate of other, more equal and less patriarchal ways of inhabiting the world.  

Created in 1982, the Prelinger Archives form the largest collection of international ephemeral cinema, with over 60,000 advertising, propaganda, educational, and amateur films, as well as home movies and American landscape films shot across the length and breadth of the 20^th century.

Caja de resonancia (Sound Box), an archive of texts, voices, video and performances that searches for the multiple forms radiating contemporary Latin American poetics, is the focal point of the eighth edition of the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme Documents, which revolves around independent artist publications, platforms, networks and publishing spaces, in addition to the potential of archive to reinvent the narratives of art and its ecosystem.

The reappearance of Native Americanness as a displacement and break-away from a modernity in crisis in 1970s and 1980s Latin American art is the subject of this encounter, made up of a lecture by Mexican artist and theorist, Mariana Botey, followed by a conversation with Peruvian researcher and feminist activist, Elisa Fuenzalida.  

The struggles in different corners of the planet with feminisms at the forefront go beyond traditional categories in readings of social movements. Putting into practice ‘the personal is political’ and reshaping our understanding of the political, the feminist tide pulses and proliferates on a global scale with its persistent iterations and capillary potential for dissemination and influence.

The research policy advocated by the Study Centre seeks to function as a collaborative springboard between research groups and independent debate. This approach is behind an encounter, organised with research+rs from the CRUSEV group, to publicly present the results of the European research project Cruising the Seventies, a reformulation of the channels through which the desires and practices of dissident bodies flowed in the late period of Francoism and the Transition to democracy in Spain.

Throughout her life, German artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) produced different compositions with scores stretching across – in much the same way as her installations – large-scale numerical tables on paper. According to Darboven, her “systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations”.

The Chair of Situated Thought. Art and Politics from Latin America seeks to articulate different experiences, adopted stances, modes of doing and initiatives of critical thought as it addresses the idiosyncrasies of an intellectual and artistic production in dialogue with social and political circumstances and underscores the specific conditions of its environment.

This conference, organised inside the framework of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition, centres on the imaginary of the Transition period in Spain via leading figures with specific artistic and activist experience of transitional counterculture, as well as current researchers and artists.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a new series of publications under the title Carta(s) which seeks to broaden the editorial format of the debates that unfold in the institution and beyond. Carta(s), the result of a joint project between the Museo’s Editorial Activities and Public Activities Departments, looks to draw attention to the reverberations between initiatives driven and welcomed by the Museo’s different lines of research and artistic and critical production. The first three recently published volumes include content that was intended for the journal carta, now transformed into this series.

The programme Documents, which surveys artists’ publications, platforms, networks and independent publishing spaces, as well as archive’s potential to reinvent narratives on art and its ecosystem, centres its seventh edition on the Argentinian magazine ramona, under the guidance of its editors Gustavo Bruzzone and Kiwi Sanz. 

This encounter sets out to rethink the notion of the archive in its different facets, reflecting on the forms in which history is presented as a disputed territory in building the present.

This international conference examines the media, narratives and practices which have sought to make contemporary visual arts accessible to wide audiences from 1950 to the present.

This seminar of public lectures, film screenings and research workshops explores how contemporary capitalism, in its galloping escalation and capacity to assimilate and produce aspects of private life, works through contradiction as a mechanism of regulation and adaptation.

Theories on the crisis of capitalism have swamped social, political and economic analyses in recent years, with all interpretations, although hugely relevant, generally lacking a proposal for the future. Paul Mason, however, has formulated a theory about the transition to an alternative and impending system — a guide to postcapitalism.

The programme Documents reflects on different thematic spheres in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre: artist publications, platforms, publishing networks, independent publications, and archive as a place that articulates and reinvents narratives about art and its ecosystem. In this, the sixth activity in the series, Mela Dávila, a contributor with documenta, Kassel, and an expert on its holdings, addresses power relations and affective affinities that reveal the institution’s epistolary archive.

Since 2010, the academic year of the Study Centre is inaugurated and closed with a lecture. Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán, Benjamin Buchloh, and Nelly Richard have each explored in their lectures different methodological approaches and tensions affecting art history in recent years. Lucy Lippard will be presenting the seventh lecture within the lecture series of Museo Reina Sofía, which on this occasion will be complemented by a workshop led by Lippard herself.

Putting ourselves in the present and placing this present inside the politics of temporality (taking up the idea of Mario Rufer) cannot be conceived outside the coloniality of power theory, formulated by Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018).

Alyce Mahon, curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning. Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2018 – 7 January 2019), will conduct a pre-opening guided tour of this retrospective, which explores the seventy-year-long career of the American artist. 

James Lingwood, curator of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. The Map and the Territory (Museo Reina Sofía 26 September 2018 – 7 January 2019), will lead a guided visit to the exhibit just before the opening with the aim of introducing the main ideas supporting Ghirri’s artistic practice. Ghirri is a key author for understanding postmodern photography and some of its fundamental theses, such as the blurring of reality with fiction and the extreme codification of representation in today’s world. 

This third session in the series Six Contradictions and the End of the Present is centred on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, activist and African American theorist, and Yayo Herrero, anthropologist, technical engineer, social educator and ecofeminist. These sessions will reflect on racial difference and care as a point of departure for contemplating a more just and equal society, putting forward a life which is possible outside ideas of production and economic value.

This program emerges out of the need to bring together ideas on the illnesses we suffer from, at a time when the welfare state has given way to a type of governance centered on the proliferation of new disorders, diseases, and medications.

Since 2000, certain universities, chiefly in the English-speaking world, have developed multidisciplinary studies, which include visual studies and others with the generic title Sound Studies. Initially, the specialised historiography in this field analysed the presence of sound and music in the arts, before focusing on vibrational force, broadening its field of analysis to literature, painting and, naturally, music.

This encounter, organised under the framework of the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, reflects on the connections between artistic practices, extreme violence and the precariousness of life.

This encounter, held in relation to the exhibition An Approach to Afal. The Autric-Tamayo Donation, recollects the central space occupied by the Afal collective in post-war Spanish photography. A conversation between two of its leading figures, photographers Ramón Masats and Carlos Pérez Siquier, and the show’s curator, Laura Terré, will be followed by the screening of Alberto Gómez Uriol’s documentary Afal, una mirada libre (Afal, a Free Gaze), which assembles declarations from the majority of its members.

This series of lectures reflects on the new forms of materiality underlying contemporaneity. The art of recent decades has been shaped by its taking the processes of dematerialisation described by Lucy Lippard in the late 1960s to the extreme; namely, the now off-centre position of the object, the development of project-based practices, the changes to the status of art work and the displacement of the concept of authorship.

As part of the A possible strength: towards a poietics of living together activities program, this reading group and collective reflection emerge with the goal of revisiting a past that reverberates in the present.

This conference is part of a collaboration set up between the Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (the Open University of Catalonia) for the completion of a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. Oriented towards critical and reflective studies, it sets out from a contemporary and expansive notion of Fine Arts which questions the traditional limits of artistic practice.

In this course, writer Servando Rocha will survey the deviations and disbandment of Dada, in addition to its repeated resurrection in popular culture, sound experiments and a wave of on-the-edge situations running from the Surrealists to the Lettrists, from Fluxus to Situationists, from punk to guerrilla communication, ending up at noise and experimental music.      

This lecture leads into an annual series which explores the relationship between tourism imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. Once a year, an innovative case study will be presented which reflects on how mass tourism, as an industry of experience, has been linked to the search for experience characterising art since 1960.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

In conjunction with the opening of Marc Pataut. First Attempts, the galleries of the exhibition will play host to a conversation between the artist and Jorge Ribalta, the show’s curator, on photography as an instrument for capturing life at its most vulnerable and precarious, and as a  public service and a form of institutional critique. Other issues addressed will include the ethics of representation of the disadvantaged subject and, ultimately, the reasons why photography remains pivotal as an artistic practice of the real.