Held on 20 may 2022
Algorithms is an evening of music based on a set of mathematical instructions describing the homonym concept. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía offers a session of guided listening with two pieces for piano by Iannis Xenakis: Herma (1961) and Evryali (1973), performed by Magdalena Cerezo Falces. To make Xenakis’s method of mathematical composition legible, the performer is joined by musicologist and educator Marina Hervás and artist Marta Verdem, whose visuals are designed specifically for the event. This will be followed by Xenakis’s piece La légende d’eer (1977-1978) performed by musician Sergio Luque, with the collaboration of Juan Carlos Blancas. Musician and architect Iannis Xenakis was born in 1922 at the heart of the Greek community of Brăila, in Romania, his compositions doing justice to Greek mathematical, harmonic and architectural tradition. Xenakis, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century music, is known for his definition of stochastic music, his forays into algorithmic music and his model of architectural-musical composition via Polytopes.
The aim of the evening is to critically contextualise the figure of this musician in relation to other models of non-European mathematical music and to analyse the implications in the current use of computer algorithms by music streaming platforms.
Juan Carlos Blancas is a sound designer, musician and teacher. He has broad experience in creating sound spaces for audiovisual, literary and stage art projects and specialises in producing field recordings, in addition to the digital transformation and processing of this material via programming environments. Under the alias Coeval he has made music since the 1990s that has been released and disseminated in different experimental audio formats and contexts, mainly in Spain and Europe. He is a founding member of the CRC Cultural Association of Digital Art and is a contributor to different training programmes in the Katarina Gurska Advanced School of Music in Madrid and the Community of Madrid’s ECAM School of Cinematography and Audiovisuals.
Magdalena Cerezo is a pianist and performer specialised in contemporary music. She is the founder of the ensembles LAB51 and f:t, and an honorary member of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and a pianist in the Arxis Ensemble. Across her career, she has played in spaces that include Madrid’s National Auditorium, Kölner Philharmonie in Cologne, Berliner Philharmonie, Staatsoper Stuttgart and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has performed at festivals such as Darmstädter Ferienkurse and Donaueschinger Musiktage in Germany, ManiFeste in France, and RESIS in Spain. Moreover, she has worked with composers like Beat Furrer, Helmut Lachenmann, Bernhard Lang and Rebecca Saunders and has premiered the works of Ablinger, Sara Glojnarić and Fabián Panisello.
Marina Hervás holds a PhD in philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a degree in Philosophy and an MA in Art Theory and Cultural Management from the La Laguna University, and a degree in Music History and Science from the University of La Rioja. She has held pre- and post-doctoral residencies at the Institute of Social Research from the University of Frankfurt and the Arts Academy in Berlin. She is the author of La escucha del ojo. Un recorrido por el sonido y el cine (Exit, 2022) and joint editor, with Pedro Alcalde, of Terremotos musicales. Denarraciones de la música en el siglo XXI (Antoni Bosch, 2020). She is currently an assistant PhD lecturer in the Department of Music History and Science at the University of Granada.
Jesús Jara is a musician, researcher and teacher. After studying Teaching and Computer Engineering at the Complutense University of Madrid, from 2011 to 2015, he studied technology and music in Germany. Since 2015, he has worked in Medialab Prado Madrid, where he approaches sound creation and education through live coding. He has participated in festivals of digital creation such as Festival EXPLORA (Bilbao), In-Sonora (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin) and AlgoMech (UK), and organised the Fourth International Conference of Live Coding in Medialab Prado (Madrid, 2019). He currently teaches at the María Dolores Pradera Municipal School of Music and Dance in Madrid and is a co-founder of the Electrosound School.
Sergio Luque is a composer of vocal, instrumental and electroacoustic music and researches computer-made music. He holds a PhD in Composition from Birmingham University and post-graduate studies in Sonology, with an honourable mention, from the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague and in Composition from the Rotterdam Conservatory. He co-directs the MA in Electroacoustic Composition and New Media at the Katarina Gurska Advanced School of Music in Madrid. He is also a guest lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague and a member of the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST). Furthermore, he has been a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico, and his music has been performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Schönberg Ensemble and Garth Knox, among others.
Marta Verde Baqueiro is a visual artist, digital creator and teacher. Her artistic practice explores indeterministic nature in the relationship between the organic and the electronic in the visible field through the use of noise, repetition and the digital processing of analogue images in real time. Her work materialises through multimedia and light installations and in collaborations with musicians and dancers as she applies the development of her own software and the construction of new devices through digital and/or electronic production. Currently, she is an associate professor at Berklee College of Music (Valencia Campus).
Curators
José Luis Espejo and Jesús Jara
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsor
Participants
Participants
![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.