Activities

This latest edition includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter.

In its fifth edition, the Neighbourhood Picnic transforms, once again, the Museo Reina Sofía, turning it into a space of encounter, enjoyment and resistance for all residents of Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.

In this lecture, Equatoguinean writer, intellectual and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo traces a literary journey on the history of Equatorial Guinea, from the era of Spanish colonisation to its independence and subsequent evolution towards an authoritarian regime and its experience of diaspora.

The Museo Reina Sofía, alongside the Wikimedia España Association, seeks to incorporate Wikipedia’s philosophy of shared knowledge into different modes of making and rethinking the museum. Within the framework of this collaboration, the publishing workshop The History of the Lavapiés Neighbourhood on Wikipedia is organised with a collaborative network of neighbourhood collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés area.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre, in collaboration with hablarenarte, put forward a family-oriented illustration workshop with Olga de Dios. Through the use of spray as a pictorial tool — combined with other more traditional tools like the paint brush — the workshop addresses issues such as creative fear, managing mistakes, the development of imagination and the experience of collective work.

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.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.

This new edition of Documents recovers the work of female cartoonists such as Montse Clavé, Ana Miralles, Núria Pompeia and Mariel Soria, and serves as a prelude to a document-based show on the same theme, to be held in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre in 2023. 

This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.

Participants will work together to create and produce a novel written collectively — customarily an individual endeavour — addressing not only the writing process but also other tasks such as editing, correcting and disseminating a text. By the same token, and in the form of a coda, the workshop will explore the performative nature of the collective novel with a public presentation in different spaces inside the Museo.

The activity is made up of a morning workshop — split into three groups with different access — which aims to raise awareness, through four stations based on the principles of four-colour printing, of the array of possibilities within the artist’s book, from its poetic beginnings with Mallarmé and Apollinaire to its more contemporary expressions.

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.

French-Argentinian artist Alejandra Riera conducts, alongside artists Caroline Déodat, Andreas-Maria Fohr and Antonio Menchen, a workshop in different spaces of the Museo, setting out from notions which form the backbone of her and the participating artists’ work: communal art-making, the fragility of materials and themes and film as an open process.