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Monday to Saturday – from 12 noon to 8pm and Sundays – from 11am to 1:30pm Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Instant Narrative, 2006–2008
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A person, sat discreetly at a table in an exhibition room, writes what is happening on a computer in a space they share with visitors. Their writings are projected onto a screen as they are typing, so that visitors, playing the leading role in this narrative, can read and grant them continuity (or not) with their actions.
Participants: Michelangelo Miccolis (regidor), Jean Capeille, Geoffrey Carey, Lyncoln Dinix, Maria Elena Fantoni, Néstor García, Ilaria Genovesio, Esperanza Gómez, Paulina Lara, Mickey Mahar, Oisin Monaghan, Paula Noya, Ana Serna, Tom Smith and Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Wednesday and Thursday – 7:30pm, Friday and Saturday – 16:30pm Sabatini Building, Rooms 206.05, 206.06 and 206.10
Meeting point: access to Room 206The Artist Without Works: A Guided Tour Around Nothing, 2009
Sabatini Building, Rooms 206.05, 206.06 and 206.10 Meeting point: access to Room 206
In a tone of direct inquiry with the audience, this monologue is set up as a guided tour around non-existent works, with five “discourses” (or “stations”) and four stops, with the last one the same as the first.The best description of this performance can be found at the beginning of the monologue: “The Artist Without Works: A Guided Tour Around Nothing is exactly what the title says: a guided tour around the works of an artist who does not produce any works. An artist who rejects the most basic rule of the art game: to teach something”.
Participants: Michelangelo Miccolis, Geoffrey Carey and Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Friday and Saturday – 6:30pm
Rehearsal / Retrospective, 2010
Sabatini Building, Hall
A performance for five performers which takes on the format of a theatre rehearsal. One of the performers plays the role of director or teacher, while the other four act as “apprentices” rehearsing four performances from Dora García’s “repertoire”: El artista sin obra (The Workless Artist, 2009), La Esfinge (The Sphinx, 2005), Rezos (Prayers, 2007), and El mensajero (The Messenger, 2002).
Participants: Michelangelo Miccolis (regidor), Jean Capeille, Geoffrey Carey, Lyncoln Dinix, Maria Elena Fantoni, Néstor García, Ilaria Genovesio, Esperanza Gómez, Paulina Lara, Mickey Mahar, Oisin Monaghan, Paula Noya, Ana Serna, Tom Smith and Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Monday to Thursday – from 1pm to 2pm and from 5pm to 6:30pm; Fridays and Saturdays – from 4pm to 6:30pm and Sundays – from 11am to 1:30pm
The Sinthome Score, 2013
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
This performance, in reference to the text Séminaire XXIII. Le Sinthome (1975-1976), by Jacques Lacan, is devised to be carried out between a body and a language: two performers, a reader-lector and a mover-movedor, with interchangeable roles, act for one another, adapting text and body. The Sinthome Score is Lacan’s text for the first and a board of movements for the second.
Participants: Michelangelo Miccolis (regidor), Jean Capeille, Geoffrey Carey, Lyncoln Dinix, Maria Elena Fantoni, Néstor García, Ilaria Genovesio, Esperanza Gómez, Paulina Lara, Mickey Mahar, Oisin Monaghan, Paula Noya, Ana Serna, Tom Smith y Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Monday, Wednesday and Thursday – from 12 noon to 8pm, Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays – from 12 noon to 6:30pm and Sundays – from 11am to 1:30pm
Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years, 2017
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
Upon a drawing of a slow and drawn-out collision of two planets-circles — one white, one black — two performers agree on the balance and distances between them, thus exploring the possible variations in this consensus.
Participants: Michelangelo Miccolis (regidor), Jean Capeille, Geoffrey Carey, Lyncoln Dinix, Maria Elena Fantoni, Néstor García, Ilaria Genovesio, Esperanza Gómez, Paulina Lara, Mickey Mahar, Oisin Monaghan, Paula Noya, Ana Serna, Tom Smith y Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Sundays – 12 noon
Real Artists Don’t Have Teeth, 2009
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A dialogue between three toothless creators, Antonin Artaud, Lenny Bruce and Jack Smith, concerning the capacity of the artist to effectively intervene in the social and historical reality surrounding them.
Performers: Eric Balbàs, Jean Capeille, Geoffrey Carey, Lyncoln Dinix, Maria Elena Fantoni, Ilaria Genovesio, Paulina Lara, Mickey Mahar and Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Thursday, 26 April – 7pm
Performance, 2016
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
Inspired by the film under the same title made by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg between 1968 and 1970, this piece of “read theatre” is made up of six scripts which are activated by each actor.
Script: Peio Aguirre; mise en scène: Dora García
Participants: Jaime Conde-Salazar, Dora García, María Jerez, Itziar Okariz, Aimar Pérez Galí, and Javier Pérez Iglesias
Admission: Limited capacity. Prior ticket collection from the Express Ticket Offices of Sabatini Building on Thursday April 26 from 10am. Maximum of 2 tickets per person. Access from 6:15pm -
Wednesday 9 May, 13 June, 11 July, and Monday 3 September – 7pm
The Joycean Society, 2013
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
Exhausted Books, one of the works featured in the exhibition Second Time Around, is not stationary and is activated when displayed with collective readings of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). The activation will begin on Wednesday 9 May at 7pm, with the Bloomsday Society of Madrid, in a collective reading open to everyone — in this case everyone is a reader; there is no audience. Therefore, those who wish to participate must bring a copy of Finnegans Wake or use one of the photocopies available for readers without a book.
Participants: The Bloomsday Society of Madrid
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Thursday, 28 June – 7pm
On Reconciliation, 2016
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A public reading of a selection of letters by German thinkers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, followed by the presentation of Dora García’s book On Reconciliation, and a subsequent discussion with the attendees. The reading of letters and the discussion will be presented by Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio), with an installation in the exhibition rooms.
Participants: Dora García, Anna-Sophie Springer and Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio).
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From Monday to Saturday – from 12 noon to 1pm Edificio Sabatini, Sala de Protocolo
Respiración artificial [Artificial Respiration], 2016
Sabatini building, Protocol Room
The protocol of this performance, inspired by a passage from Ricardo Piglia’s novel, is the following: various collaborators of the artist will travel to sites of interest in Madrid, where they will describe what they see and hear, before reciting their descriptions as a prayer and recording it as an audio archive to be later transcribed as text. Different scenes, understood as shots or a storyboard, will be selected from the text and “pondered”, mixed and numbered. Once in the exhibition rooms, two performers, located on different levels, will act for each other, alternately reading scenes and, through their litany, invoking the situations described.
Participants: María Jesús Aragoneses, Nur Banzi, Lorena Benéitez, Amaia Bono, Carla Canseco, Geoffrey Carey, Diana Delgado-Ureña, Michela Depetris, Dunia Díaz, Lyncoln Dinix, Elsa Duhaut, Maria Elena Fantoni, Néstor García, Ilaria Genovesio, Rocío Gutiérrez, Esperanza Gómez, Bárbara Hang, Raúl Hidalgo, Jessica Huerta, Irene Izquierdo de la Gala, Beatriz Jordana, Paulina Lara, Katty López, Anna Katarina Martin, María Menchaza Paz, Michelangelo Miccolis, Eliana Murgia, Paula Noya, Cris Rodríguez, Ana Serna.
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Mondays – from 6pm to 7:30pm Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3
Prayers, 2007
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, terrace and exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A person approaches some of the visitors of the exhibition and seems to whisper in their ears a monotonous and continuous monologue, like a prayer. Only the one to whom this monologue is addressed knows exactly what it is about.
Participants: Ilaria Genovesio, Paulina Lara, Paula Noya, Ana Serna and Nicholas Von Kleist.
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Wednesdays – from 6:30pm to 7:30pm Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3
The Sphinx, 2005
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, terrace and exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A young woman chooses one of the visitors to the exhibition with her magnetic gaze. She approaches him/her, and with a confidential voice proposes a series of questions. Each question can only be answered with yes or no.
Participants: Ilaria Genovesio, Paulina Lara, Paula Noya and Ana Serna.
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Thursdays – from 6:30pm to 7:30pm Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3
The messenger, 2002
Sabatini Building, Floor 3, terrace and exhibition rooms from the Dora García. Second Time Around show
A young man tries to find among the visitors of the exhibition, with great urgency and sometimes with despair, someone who can reveal to him the meaning of a message he is carrying, in a language that he neither identifies nor understands.
Participants: Lyncoln Dinix, Mickey Mahar y Nicholas Von Kleist.
Held on 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 abr, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31 may, 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 jun, 01, 02, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 jul, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31 ago, 01, 02, 03 sep 2018
The exhibition devoted to Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) is accompanied by a specific programme of performances by the artist. Carried out during the exhibition period, this initiative seeks to vindicate performance as a privileged medium, moving closer to the core strands in García’s work. In this vein, three main ideas will be illuminated: fiction as a construction of situations, readings understood as a collective process which redefines works and the relationships between readers, and narration as a critical exercise in terms of the roles undertaken. Ultimately, these ideas stress how the capacity for giving form, transforming and dismantling accounts that pass through us is an action of resistance.
* All performances will be conducted in Spanish, with the exception of Instant Narrative, which will be adapted to the language of the performer; The Artist Without Works: A Guided Tour Around Nothing which will be bilingual in English and Spanish, and On Reconciliation, with simultaneous interpretation English-Spanish.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.