
Held on 23 oct 2020
Over the course of six encounters, the study group Body, Territory and Conflict seeks to develop a space of action and thought focused on the critique of the so-called Anthropocene, a geological era defined by growing and destructive human intervention on the planet. In considering extractivist capitalism as a reality situated at the crossroads of the body and the environment and trusting the critical potential of live arts and architecture, these sessions will address, transversally, the impact of anthropocentric logics on the structural inequality of territories and resources. The themes touched upon here include: the collapse of civilisation, environmental justice, collective memory, different forms of absence that persist in the landscape, ecology, artistic practices in nature, pre-modern hybrid corporalities, acoustic geography and, finally, the cancellation of the future in the Anthropocene.
The work sessions will combine two formats — a reading group and a workshop as a practical laboratory — and set out to encourage the deployment of bibliographic materials submitted by artists and researchers acting as guest mediators: Rosa Casado, Ramón del Castillo, Óscar Cornago, Diana Delgado-Ureña, Uriel Fogué, Victoria Pérez Royo, Rafael Tormo i Cuenca, Jaime Vallaure and Óscar Villegas.
The coordination of the study group will be run by Fernando Quesada, a member of the ARTEA collective, and its thematic programme is linked to the research project The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices of Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Programa:
Painted into a Corner
Friday, 16 October 2020
Session moderated by Diana Delgado-Ureña and Jaime Vallaure
Landscapes and Gardens
Friday, 27 November 2020
Session moderated by Óscar Cornago and Rafael Tormo i Cuenca
Nature, Ecology and Artistic Practices
Friday, 18 December 2020
Session moderated by Ramón del Castillo
Old Bodies, New Politics
Friday, 15 January 2021
Session moderated by Victoria Pérez Royo
A Map on the End of the World
Friday, 12 February 2021
Session moderated by Uriel Fogué
Quiet, Too Quiet but not Silent
Friday, 12 March 2021
Session moderated by Rosa Casado and Óscar Villegas
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the
Coordinated by
Fernando Quesada
Force lines
Action and Radical Imagination, Contemporary Disturbances
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of

Admission:
Registration closed (capacity: 25 people)
Sessions:
23 October, 27 November, 18 December 2020, and 15 January, 12 February and 12 March 2021
Time:
from 4pm to 7pm
Participants
Fernando Quesada is an architect and head lecturer in Architectural Projects at the University of Alcalá de Henares. He has also been part of the research-creation group ARTEA since its inception. His research work focuses on two major fields: the theory and history of modern and contemporary architecture, and its relationship with stage arts and performance, and the main lines of work in this critical framework are the body, biopolitics, spatiality and social theatricality. Furthermore, he has been a long-term guest lecturer on three occasions: at Delft University of Technology (2009–2010), at Museo Universitario MUAC from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México UNAM (2013), and the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (2019).
He is author of the books La caja mágica. Cuerpo y escena (Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2005), Del cuerpo a la red. Cuatro ensayos sobre la descorporeización del espacio (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2013) and Arquitecturas del devenir. Aproximaciones a la performatividad del espacio (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2014), and editor of Cairon 12. Cuerpo y arquitectura (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2009), Comunidad. Común. Comuna (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2015), Ser Público. Ficciones arquitectónicas para Madrid (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2017) and Tecnopastoralismo. Ensayos y proyectos en torno a la Arcadia tecnificada (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2020). He is currently putting together the book Mobile Theater. Architectural Counterculture on Stage, with Actar Publishers.
Más actividades
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.