Activities

Continuing with the same strand of independent comics, and previous instalments devoted to Chris Ware and Julie Doucet, this edition of Documents is centred on the work of Daniel Clowes (Chicago, 1961), a key point of reference in contemporary comic books. On this occasion, Clowes will also participate in an encounter with Rubén Lardín.

Thinking about the World from Art and Science is an activity organised by the Museo Reina Sofía to present the CNIO Arte project, an initiative run by the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicos (the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre), which has combined contemporary art and science since 2018. The project seeks to spark dialogue between international scientists and artists to explore common territories and to produce work from this conversation.

This fresh instalment examines an unexplored side of Joan Miró’s career: his poetic pursuit and the influence of poetry on his work. Therefore, the activity comprises a round-table discussion, conducted by specialists Olvido García Valdés, María González Menéndez and Carlos Martín García, and is centred on the analysis of a poetic text written by Miró, regarded as a possible manifesto of his artistic work. 

The Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter in memory of cultural manager Berta Sureda (Barcelona, 1959 – Palma de Mallorca, 2024), whose work was pivotal in opening new horizons in cultural institutions, placing creators front and centre and driving forward citizen participation. The activity here comprises a series of interventions by different cultural agents and fellow professionals and is conducted, in parallel, in the Museo Reina Sofía and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), with a live streaming between both spaces. The interventions will be followed by a dance piece by the company Mal Pelo, performed by María Muñoz.

Ecologies of Utopian Desire, held inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, welcomes draughtsman and writer Miguel Brieva, who, across his career, has created a realm from which to imagine ecologically desirable worlds. Brieva is joined by researchers Julia Ramírez-Blanco and Alberto Berzosa to reflect, in conversation, on how to dream of better worlds, with an awareness of the political agency of these dreams and their viability and ideology.

The performances of James Lee Byars (Detroit, Michigan, 1932 – Cairo, 1997) bring together the aesthetic and life concerns of this unique artist. In conjunction with the exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to the artist, under the title James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question, and inside the framework of the programme Living Matter. Other Approaches to Material, this day re-stages, over two sessions, a selection of James Lee Byars’s performances, which open a dialogue with his visual work inside the space of the show. In the form of a coda, the activity also includes the presentation of a new performance conceived specifically for the occasion, Acaeció en Granada, which explores Byars’s relationship with the artist Miguel Benlloch (Loja, Granada, 1954 – Seville, 2018) in the city of Granada.

This encounter welcomes screenings of films by Shuruq Harb (Ramallah, 1980), Shereen Abdel-Karim Hassanein (Gaza City, 1996) and Lara Salous (Ramallah, 1988), three Palestinian multidisciplinary artists that are part of the Tadafuq project, which provides artistic training and mentoring online for Palestinian creatives from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem. The initiative has been developed by artist and curator Nicolás Combarro since 2020.

The Museo’s Study Centre organises two days that pivot around the second edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, a team of mobilisers — researchers that propel and coordinate, from their respective fields, the different Seminars in the Programme — share the work carried out to date and reflect upon their future perspectives. By the same token, the group of student resident researchers will present their own work, through posters, and will converse with other participants.  

In conjunction with World Refugee Day, this new edition of Situated Voices seeks to open a critical dialogue to thrust these major changes into the spotlight, changes which facilitate and accelerate processes of return or advocate the funding of third countries to exercise control over the movement of migrating peoples.

This encounter, organised inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, sets out two sessions centred on incorporating environmental perspectives into the field of cultural studies, with an emphasis on situated research in an Iberian context. As a result, Adrián Almazán, Germán Labrador and Jaime Vindel will engage in conversation with researchers Jaume Franquesa and Iñaki Prádanos.

Inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, science and environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz reflects, alongside Adrián Almazán, the Seminar’s co-mobiliser, on global energy transformations in recent years and the need to adopt a critical perspective regarding models of ecological transition.

Once again, for another year, the Museo Situado assembly invites all residents and communities from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood to pervade the Museo Reina Sofía, inhabiting its spaces and transforming its Garden at the Neighbourhood Picnic. In short, a chance to encounter, celebrate and vindicate the struggles, rights and desires that mobilise them every day.    

With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau.

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre, in collaboration with PhotoBook Club Madrid, organise this year’s edition of Harvest, an annual public encounter which presents photobook mock-ups and is open to creatives of every stripe.