Activities

To mark the 16^th edition of Book Night, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre present a new poem by artist Eduardo Scala entitled INSTANTeTERNO (INSTANT and ETERNAL), written for this occasion.

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.

By delving deeper into the domesticity of appliance, this activity also seeks to widen the margins of listening to different inhabitants and agents — human and non-human, vegetative, electro-domestic — that make up our domestic space, or what we call house or home. Different forms that make up the same place, different territories in which different temporalities cross over and from which perspectives that reach remote locations open.

This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions.

This encounter sees feminist illustrator Zainab Fasiki (Fez, 1994), writer Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) — both participants in and advocates of L’amour fait loi — and writer Najat El Hachmi (Nador, 1979), author of the novel On Monday We Will Be Loved, discuss the protests that have arisen in Morocco through the increasingly frequent actions in defence of sexual rights. They also look at the need for other accounts and imaginaries that reflect the complexity, diversity and richness of Morocco’s intimate territory and its diaspora, habitually accounted for and represented with the simplification and reductionism exuded by the colonial and exoticizing gaze.

New trans* feminism, anti-colonial and non-binary struggles, incorporated by different bodies and generations, have undoubtedly resignified the meaning of queer, just as positions reclaiming a new normal have been reformulated.

Harvest 2021, therefore, sets out a debate and reflection around publishing and producing photobooks, inviting people immersed in the layout phase of a project to share their photographic works with the other participants.

A group of feminist lawyers, journalists and producers formed the observer brigade Open the Gates! in May 2021, with the aim of documenting and granting visibility to the work and living situation of numerous female day labourers, both local and seasonal migrant workers.

The Museo Reina Sofía organises a visit to the exhibition Vivian Suter, led by the artist herself, which includes the screening of the film Vivian’s Garden (2017), directed by Rosalind Nashashibi.

This encounter gets under way with an artist-led guided tour around the exhibition Charlotte Johannesson. Take Me to Another World, ending in a conversation between Johannesson, Patricia Molins and Mabel Tapia. 

Forms of sexual dissidence have always inhabited dislocated spaces and strange times, yet they still connect life paths in seemingly diverse places and temporalities. The programme through which the Museo Reina Sofía contributes to LGTBIQ+ 2021 Pride seeks to address the violence, complexities and contradictions of the present by hearing multiple voices and acting as a platform and speaker for bodies in struggles.

Criba , an artist’s book published by PEZPLATA Ediciones (2021), straddles the graphic and the poetic, the showing and the naming. This encounter sees artist Laura Lio and poet Ada Salas strike up a dialogue between the written image and the painted word, processes that sit at the centre of the publication, expounding their creative and publishing-based undertaking.

As a medicine cabinet well stocked with first aid material, the project looks to delve deeper into the conception of care with the help of ideas and useful resources to identify what is good for us collectively and to open pathways that allow us to live differently. All of this is mutually understood with the knowledge, particularly migrant knowledge, and experiences of people who inhabit this collectiveness in the search for a multicultural community neighbourhood with shared future perspectives.

El Picnic del barrio es, para l+s vecin+s de Lavapiés (Madrid), una celebración del estar juntas y del hacer solidario que caracteriza la vida en el barrio. La iniciativa, que tuvo su primera edición en junio de 2018, adquiere en esta ocasión una especial connotación de reencuentro.

To mark the end of the documentary exhibition The Weight of Form. The Graphic Design of Carlos Cruz-Diez, the Museo Reina Sofía organises Modern South, a conversation which, starting from Carlos Cruz-Diez’s graphic and publishing work, explores different areas related to graphic art in Venezuela, comparing it to events in other Latin American countries, in addition to the subsequent evolution of graphic design in the region. 

Soledad Liaño, curator of Ida Applebroog. Marginalias, leads a tour around the said exhibition, taking selected readings from the artist’s diary, to be recited publicly for the first time alongside her visual work by actress Nuria Mencía.

This new edition of Situated Voices puts forward, in line with its format as an assembly-based, horizontal forum bringing together experiences, involvement in and knowledge of today’s pressing issues, a conversation on remittances from a feminist viewpoint, situating the focus on the crossreads between migration, the unequal division of jobs, care, and the role of women inside this cross-border logic.

In this encounter, Hanan Dalouh Amghar, Maggie Schmitt and three activists from northern Morocco they met on their trip will discuss the situation of the feminist movement in the context of present-day Morocco, exploring issues, leading figures, disputes and challenges and placing the stress on the diversity of initiatives, priorities and practices, and on the different realities of country and city, centre and periphery.

This second edition sees artist Carme Nogueira share her art-making as she revisits, with a group of Museo Reina Sofía workers, her project Tenerife (2020), in which she engages in dialogue with the homonymous 1932 film by Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar, who both worked with Luis Buñuel on the documentary Las Hurdes. Land without Bread (1933).

Women’s right to decide and the struggles for reproductive and sexual rights have formed one of the channels of articulation for feminisms, and are currently configured as a driving force that imbues debates with vitality and generates new energies. This debate looks at different political, organisational, technological and mutual support strategies for feminist movements, as well as contributing to reflecting and constructing feminist thought by activisms in different territories; namely, in Argentina, Poland, Italy, El Salvador and Spain.

In the Meantime seeks to offer diverse possibilities for thinking about and placing context around the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 show, organised inside a framework of cultural cooperation between Spain and Morocco in the sphere of Museums and promoted by the National Foundation of Museums from the Kingdom of Morocco and the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, in collaboration with Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

This conversation between people with first-person trans* experiences, their families and their environments seeks to situate the specific demands of the collectives involved, and to understand the key parts to this future law and the problems underlying the controversies it provokes.   

On the basis that humour is never neutral, as well as its capacity to question the established order and work as a powerful normalising force, this encounter interrogates supposedly humorous images which instead instil prejudice and normalise stereotypes.

They Wanted Arms but People Arrived is a radio series and theatre piece on migration and domestic work, written and performed by women from the Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory) association and featuring the participation of sound artist Susana Jiménez Carmona and the work cooperative Pandora Mirabilia.

On the ocassion of the Concha Jerez retrospective, Our Memory Is Being Stolen (29 July – 11 January 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter with the artist, alongside critic and theorist Mieke Bal and critic and exhibition curator Fernando Castro Flórez, two figures behind the exhibition catalogue and the participation of Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofía.

The programme Together and Rising Up assembles a series of activities, exhibitions, rooms from the Collection, study groups, guided tours and digital projects inside the Museo, to be presented over the course of 2021, and thus reflecting the plural nature of transfeminist struggles and the complexity of new challenges for feminism. 

Night of Ideas is an annual event propelled since 2016 by the Institut français in Paris and occasions a reflection on the major challenges of our times. The sixth edition of the event in 2021 is held under the title Proches (Close) and sets out to rethink the relations between living beings and new forms of solidarity.

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?

The 2021 Aníbal Quijano Chair programme, organised by Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre, will seek to address and disentangle the meanings of that paradox from far-reaching perspectives and political projects of the present — feminisms, environmentalism, anti-racist and decolonial movements — taken as vectors which question and stir political orthodoxies.

In a remembrance of Samba on the anniversary of her death, the Platform in Memory of Samba and Museo Situado organised a participatory action involving the creation of a large collective bunch of flowers made up of artworks in different formats and left on 19 December 2020 in the cemetery where her body lies. In total, more than forty works in her memory were submitted.

This encounter, therefore, sets out to convene, converse with and create fruitful exchanges between some of the leading figures in these struggles, setting out from the conviction that, from their view of the world, their networks of self-protection and their ways of “shouldering” rebellion, they are developing the syndicalist feminism to come.

Carta(s) is a series of publications with which the Museo Reina Sofía seeks to broaden, through the publishing format, some of the debates that take place in the institution and beyond its walls, granting visibility to initiatives propelled or embraced by the Museo’s different lines of research and its artistic and critical productions. The presentation of this new publication takes the form of an encounter between the authors of the texts (Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and María Rosón), sociologist and feminist archivist Javiera Manzi and artist and cultural critic Marcelo Expósito. 

The collective imaginary and information around the propagation and spread of COVID-19 have radically changed the way we relate to one another, so much so that we perceive encounters with others as a threat. 

The crisis brought on by the pandemic continues to highlight the need to urgently drive forward a programme of interpreters-mediators equipped with enough resources and the capacity to operate constantly and effectively in languages such as Bengali, Wolof, Urdu, Arabic, Bambara, Tagalog and Chinese in all spheres of society, where necessary.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.  

ESTUDIO in Conversation is an encounter which makes up part of the second edition of ESTUDIO, “Half Said, Unsaid”, a programme which brings together the enquiries of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.  

Time is a project which, through the collective production of an experimental film, explores the intangible, and the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers, delving deeper into different works from the Collection.

In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.

We Are All Old. We Are All Mortal is an invitation to consider how we want to age, an opportunity to analyse different alternatives and underline the right to live and die with dignity.

The Virus in Fortress Europe sets out an open conversation between social agents that gather diverse experiences and foreground the lives, in these times of pandemic, of migrant people who are blocked, ill-treated and crowded together at Europe’s internal and external borders, the problems they face and their resistance.

Surviving Together. Community Organisation in Times of Pandemic sets out to constitute a reflection based on an open conversation around specific forms of resistance, cooperation, self-management, and community solidarity in different places framed in the context of the capitalist crisis and the current health emergency.

The Museo Reina Sofía and Fundación Arquia present a monographic exhibition on architect José María García de Paredes (Seville, 1924 – Madrid, 1990), in a contribution which aims to disseminate and promulgate Spanish contemporary architecture.