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September 21, 2016
The New Art of Making Books. Ulises Carrión and expanded publishing
11:00 - 11:30 a.m.
Guy Schraenen. The Tongue of the Poets11:30 - 12:00 a.m.
Javier Maderuelo. Expanded Writing: Mail Art and Archive12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
Luigi Amara and Heriberto Yépez, in conversation. The Carrión Effect on Visual Arts and Contemporary Literature2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Continuous screening of the following films by Ulises Carrión:
A Book, 1978, 8’
The Death of an Art Dealer, 1982, 19’ 57’’
Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, 1981, 45’
The LPS File, 1985, 35’39’’
TV Tonight Video, 1987, 10’4:00 p.m.
Guided tour around the exhibition Dear reader. Don’t read, by its curator, Guy Schraenen4:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Felipe Ehrenberg. Digressions: Memories of Carrión5:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Raúl Marroquín. In-Out Center. Cárdenas, Carrión and Marroquín (1972-’75)5:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Round-table discussion with Felipe Ehrenberg and Raúl Marroquín, moderated by Mela Dávila7:00 p.m.
Mario Bellatin. Write without writing. Due to health reasons the presence of Mario Bellatin is canceled, but his unpublished text written for the occasion, will be read as a closure of the seminar
Held on 21 sep 2016
This seminar analyses the role of Ulises Carrión (Mexico, 1941 - Holland, 1989) in conceiving new strategies to disseminate and distribute art from the mid-seventies, and the emphasis he placed on reinventing the uses, forms and appearances of the book as a device for action. It also looks to acknowledge and highlight Carrión’s capacity for conceiving publishing as a relational practice and understanding the archive as a set of performance protocols from which to reorder, or at least shake up, the art system.
Carrión’s awareness of and interest in new art forms and innovative trends propelled him to actively participate in the majority of the artistic disciplines of his time. His diverse works mix and combine, and become distanced from one another to form an indissoluble ensemble reflected in the entirety of his works as a writer, poet, essayist, artists’ book author, creator of videos and films, founder of the bookshop-gallery Other Books and So, editor, organiser of exhibitions and diverse projects, collector, much to his regret, and a pioneer in various works in the international Mail Art community, together with artists such as Clemente Padín and Felipe Ehrenberg, during his most creative period. Therefore, his artistic figure and approaches are in force in current and pressing debates on the production, circulation and reception of knowledge or issues related to archive.
Halfway through the 1970s, Carrión established himself Amsterdam, founding in 1975 Other Books and So, which he turned into an archive in 1979; an experimental and experiential centre articulated around a concept of the archive as an acting, living and relational element. With this initiative he transformed the constitutive identity of the archive - accumulation, organisation, systemisation and homogenisation - into a series of strategies for approaching artistic activity as a life exercise. Another of his concerns was “breaking free” from literature and putting forward liberated writing linked to the critique of the meaning of avant-garde movements throughout history, so as to appropriate the book and publishing as artistic materials. “Dear reader. Don’t read”, one of his most widely recognised aphorisms and the title of the exhibition held alongside this seminar, explores his perpetual challenges, the will to construct and deconstruct.
In collaboration with
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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.