Activities

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.    

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) via its Bachelor’s Degree in Art and aims to promote, annually, an in-person encounter which intersects and establishes a dialogue between university and museum. The space, geared towards training artists, seeks to contribute to creating an expanded and connected community of student creatives and researchers, and is linked to the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre.  

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.

This public programme explores, via lectures, drifts, encounters and performances throughout the month of June, one of the main strands in the Museo Reina Sofía’s temporary exhibition season: the return of materiality. The exhibitions Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question and Eva Lootz. Making as if Wondering: So What Is This? all share references to the affective, speculative and spiritual capacity of matter.

The focal point of this film season organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid is film-maker Billy Woodberry (Dallas, 1950), whose filmography, despite comprising only a handful of works, is striking for its great political and creative intensity. Through his films, Woodberry unearths and probes episodes of history that have disappeared into obscurity, stressing that which official accounts deemed irrelevant to then place them under the spotlight, not solely from activism but also capturing their sensorial and poetic side.  

How I Would Gaze in Wonder. Imagination and Ordinary Beauty is the title of a new encounter by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores the daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint. This fresh edition looks to address the power of imagination in daily life, beauty as method and imaginative methodologies to invoke futures that are already here and pasts still to be discovered.

Anastasio de Gracia Foundation and the Museo Reina Sofía pay homage to the Hungarian-American photojournalist on the seventieth anniversary of his death via the concert Slightly Out of Focus, a work inspired by a same-titled autobiographical book (Henry Holt and Company, 1947) and performed by Italian musician Fabio Turchetti and Hungarian pianist Grego Foldvari. In accompaniment with the sound composition is a video-graphic piece by Raquel Sardá and Vicente Alemany.

Museo Situado organises, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía’s Conservation and Restoration and Artwork Registration Departments, a new edition of the Course on Handling, Packing, Transporting and Installing Cultural Heritage Artefacts. The aim is to give people with migrant life stories from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood some insight into how artworks are handled and exhibitions are installed.

On Friday, 17 May the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day courtesy of a vibrant music programme curated by Radio 3. Throughout the day, the Nouvel Courtyard will once again become the stage for a live schedule of music conducted by Radio 3 — also livestreamed on the Radio 3 website – including a total of fifty live performances from 7am to 10pm, while from 9pm to midnight the Sabatini Building Garden will be immersed in electronic music played by Radio 3 DJs.

For decades and particularly since the escalating genocide in Gaza in October 2023, scores of collectives and people have supported the cause of the Palestinian people and their resistance against colonial practices of violence, control and apartheid brought to bear by the Israeli State in the form of daily war.

A medida que transitamos desde la adquisición del conocimiento a través de los libros hacia la creciente influencia de la inteligencia artificial (IA), el panorama del ingenio humano está cambiando. Al explorar la nueva atención de los sistemas de IA como ChatGPT y los generadores de imágenes, este diálogo entre Mercedes Bunz y Oier Etxeberria reflexiona sobre lo que significa "calcular" significados y cómo da forma al enfoque de la tecnología hacia nuestro mundo.

This encounter is part of the Artistic Research Practice Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue, sees Miguel Errazu and Paloma Polo converse with Yazan Khalili around the distance or conflict that can transpire between an artwork (and the politics it upholds) and the economic and political agendas that decide and channel its institutionalisation.

This performance series by De Soto, in close proximity to that which is termed durational art, takes root in a genealogy of works which, from the 1970s, have challenged the audience to delve deeper into the art of waiting, inviting them to look closer and listen more attentively.

Feminist and anti-racist political scientist Françoise Vergès (Paris, 1952) gives a lecture on the relationship between the massacre of the Palestinian people and the history of Western democracies built on colonialism, and thus on the genocide of indigenous peoples, extraction, exploitation and destruction of the environment.

Through art, the intention of this program is to create collective spaces for critical reflection on the current complex geopolitical scenario, as well as to support Palestinian artists and curators in connecting their struggles and experiences with international solidarity networks.

El programa Documentos está dedicado a las relaciones entre el arte y la actividad editorial, abordando temas como los efectos del archivo en las narraciones de la historia del arte, el libro de artista o la edición como práctica artística. Esta entrega está dedicada al trabajo de Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), autora fundamental en la evolución del cómic underground norteamericano de finales del siglo XX, que participa en un encuentro con Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz y Camille Vannier.

Lecturer and researcher Ann Rigney is a key reference point within contemporary memory studies, conducting research that is situated at the intersections of prose, collective identity and the elusive past.

Durante los años 2022 y 2023, en colaboración con el equipo de Museo en Red (hoy renombrado Museo Tentacular), La Laboratoria participó en el Nodo crítico Investigaciones Militantes de Tejidos conjuntivos, el Programa de Estudios Propios del Museo Reina Sofía. Simultáneamente impulsó y acompañó una serie de estancias donde distintos colectivos, investigador+s y artist+s problematizaron cuestiones muy diversas enfocadas desde la investigación militante como una práctica política que genera conocimiento colectivo. En la tela de araña es un programa de dos jornadas, que incluyen varias conversaciones y una pieza escénica, a modo de culminación de este proceso de investigación y creación.

Ghanaian artist, curator and cultural manager Ibrahim Mahama gives a lecture in the Museo, running through his professional career and exploring the continuities between academic research, artistic creation and current curatorial strategies to reconsider the transformative role of art from the Global South. The lecture is part of the Curatorial Practices Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre bring forward World Book Day to 21 April to participate in the BookCrossing initiative of other Spanish museums and cultural centres. The initiative is about “freeing” a series of books in different public spaces, in this case in the Museo and its surrounding areas. Anyone can take these books home to, once read, repeat the action.

This encounter sets forth a journey through the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The tour, conducted by curator Manuel Borja-Villel, punctuates aspects that make Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) a key artist for the present and culminates in a poetry recital — selected and read by Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann and Victoria Pradilla — on the relationships between the Catalan artist and poetic writing. 

How to rewrite and recount history when its fragments are not in archives? How to tell marginalised, invisible, and even non-imagined stories? These are among the questions that steer Daniellis Hernández Calderón’s search through the visual arts. 

Queer. L.E. The Second Queer Literature Encounter encompasses a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives from different angles and perspectives in literature, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. 

Through poetry, the moving image and debate, the programme looks to expand social awareness and promote civic commitment in support of robust, effective and urgent measures for the eco-social crisis we are currently facing. The scheduled activities are laid out according to the four laws of ecology formulated by Barry Commoner, a North American biologist and activist.

Mariano Llinás, one of the most original and salient figures in recent cinema, returns after his epic La flor (The Flower, 2018) with a metafictional piece on family, memory and art history. The film explores the process of producing a biographical documentary around the figure of the illustrious architect Clorindo Testa (1923–2013), a friend of the film-maker’s father, the poet and art critic Julio Llinás. In between, akin to a frenetic detective story, suspense, politics, autobiography and, above all, humour convene in what is also an underlying reflection on what film is and what are, if they are actually of use, the narrations the director puts forward.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of Look Closely. Feminist Editathon by Women Creators, a Wikipedia publishing workshop which looks to minimise the gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, contributing to creating and improving new entries by women artists. 

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Caribbean tides and currents, which flow through the Sabatini Building’s Garden and Cloister from 10pm until midnight as part of the ARCOmadrid 2024 closing party. Embracing the themes of this edition of the Madrid art fair, The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, DJ Valerie Brathwaite and Toccororo will unfurl a sound-based connection between distant shores, and with influences and approaches that are as interesting as they are different.

This encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. The texts, gathered in the volume Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024], edited by Aurora Carmenate Díaz, are the pretext for celebrating the forms of making and the networks Díaz Bringas wove throughout her life.