Live Arts

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.

Unending love or love dies, on repeat like it's endless is a choreography which explores relationships between desire, dance, fragmentation, love (understood as communality), mourning and time. Through the gesture, sensuality, relationality and touch, Baczyński-Jenkins’s practice unfurls structures and politics of desire.

The Museo organises Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, a double programme which is part of the 40^th Autumn Festival of Madrid. The first part features the performance of Monument 0.6: Heterochrony, a stage piece by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon, who creates an imaginary scene between past and present.

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning is the title under which a set of activities are set in motion around the echo of activities celebrating All Souls Day with a programme of live arts, before continuing with a study group under the same name. It seeks to open up a dialogue around mourning as a human process of loss and mourning established by the world through reflections from artistic forms of expression, social movements and environmental activism.

Three years on from its first edition, the Second International Feminist Encounter on the Witch-hunt. Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence Against Women continues by retrieving the memory of women accused of being witches and hounded and murdered in the Early Modern Period, and analysing mechanisms used for such purposes which persist today.

This activity looks to bring the audience closer to the different performance pieces by approaching research fields which explore the different projects. Thus, it constitutes a common learning space in the form of a conversation between speakers in collaboration with the artists participating in this fourth edition. Set out around three conversations, the encounter prompts a reflection, questions and shared references as well as detecting and revealing common interests, connections and potential.

Under the title Second Skin. Subcutaneous, this latest edition approaches people’s relationship with the world through the skin, understood both in the literal sense, the integumentary system which covers the body of vertebrate animals, and figuratively, the layer or layers of experiences, affection, knowledge, tradition or bodily techniques determining appearance and relationships.

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 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.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía continues with its annual welcomes toTime has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

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.

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.

For the sixth year running, the Archipelago concert series invites the public to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening. This year, certain material questions are addressed which influence musical mutations, with the aim of providing a recap of what is learned on the common history of tradition and contemporary culture to reinterpret and update this discourse through forced migration, the transport of wood, metals and minerals and the importance of ports and old maritime routes in our listening.   

On this occasion, experimental duo Los Voluble put forward an audiovisual and sound exploration which reflects on 1992 and its implications in the cultural, social and political sphere of the country, drawing from archive material, electronic music and live cinema.