Held on 10 Feb 2022
Across six sessions, the study group Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities seeks to investigate alternative models in cultural and art theory, and in artistic practices, which radically challenge the relationship between animals and humans.
Underpinned by a cultural rather than biological reasoning, these relationships have gone through different stages in Western culture, in which animals have been perceived as a direct threat or possible predator, a sacred, mythological or superhuman figure, a food source, resource, ally or energy support for work, an object of entertainment and, finally, a pet or a companion that is progressively humanised. With advances in the observation of microscopic life forms, our notions of the animal kingdom expand as they are also thrown into crisis: living microscopic creatures, viruses and bacteria or the chemical compounds of living beings are today still a threat to life (infection, plagues) and a support for it (vaccines); a quasi-sacred figure which invokes our sexual identity (hormones) a food prosthesis of human well-being (vitamins, probiotics) or a possible direct source of energy (phytoplankton or algae). The list of possibilities is almost endless, but in all cases the asymmetric relationship between humans and animals built on every scale for centuries remains virtually intact.
Research into animals’ spatial environment by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, conducted in the early decades of the twentieth century, and converging fully with developments in historical avant-garde art movements, were sufficiently reflexive, transversal and long-lasting to directly impact thinkers of the human condition like Martin Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. The substantial legacy of Uexküll spread across the century and connected animals’ space to the human communication system: language. Uexküll’s descriptive semiotic model on the environment clashes, however, with proposals by Anthropocene researchers such as Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret and Rosi Braidotti. With the notions of wild thought, human-animal coproduction and the between-zone core topics for discussion, this study group puts forward research around the said clash via sessions moderated by guest researchers María Auxiliadora Gálvez, Ana Harcha Cortés, María Jerez, María Teresa Muñoz, Susana Velasco and Silvia Zayas.
Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities is the continuation of the study group Body, Territory and Conflict, which took place from October 2020 to March 2021. The study group will be coordinated by Fernando Quesada, a member of the collective ARTEA, with its thematic programme linked to the research project The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices in Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Programme
Thursday, 10 February 2022
People say a couple of Eurasian magpies dominate the Museo Reina Sofía Garden, and, at most, a few Passer domesticus and Turdus merula also live with them
—Moderated by María Jerez
Thursday, 24 February 2022
Inter-species Flesh
—Moderated by María Auxiliadora Gálvez
Thursday, 17 March 2022
Architecture-Medium
—Moderated by Susana Velasco
Thursday, 7 April 2022
Cages and Traps, Between Social Construct and Architectural Form
—Moderated by María Teresa Muñoz
Thursday, 21 April 2022
Their Mouths Are the Head for the Dark
—Moderated by Silvia Zayas
Thursday, 26 May 2022
Pluriverse Corporealities: How to Create Wild Lives?
—Moderated by Ana Harcha Cortés
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María Auxiliadora Gálvez holds a PhD in Architecture and is a landscapist who teaches the Feldenkrais method. Between 2006 and 2010, she was a coordinator for Panama in the International Cooperation Project for Social Housing developed by the Andalusian Government. In 2016, she founded the Applied Somatics Platform for Architecture and Landscape (PSAAP). She is a lecturer at the Advanced Polytechnic School of the CEU San Pablo University in Madrid, and on two occasions she has been selected for the Venice Biennale and has received different international awards, most notably in the 6th, 7th and 9th editions of EUROPAN. Her research into the use of somatics as a tool and place of discovery has resulted in the books Espacio somático. Cuerpos múltiples (Ediciones asimétricas, 2019) and Descampados: caminando la ciudad somática (2022).
Ana Harcha Cortés is a performer, playwright, researcher and stage creator. Her work focuses on manifestations of theatres linked to the political, politics and performance, and she is part of the Theatre Department in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile, where she coordinates the Nucleus of Research and Art Creation, Politics and Community. She is also a contributor with the research group ARTEA.
María Jerez is an artist whose work is situated between choreography, film and the visual arts. Her recent works question theatre and film conventions and the spectator’s implicit understanding of them, opening potential spaces through encounters with that which the spectator finds strange and alien and establishing blurred edges between that which is known and unknown, between object and subject, the animate and the inanimate. Her work seeks to escape logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge becomes something vulnerable before other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
María Teresa Muñoz is an architect who holds a PhD in Architecture from Madrid’s School of Architecture and an MA in Architecture from the University of Toronto (Canada). She has worked as a professor of Architectural Projects at Madrid’s School of Architecture and is currently professor emeritus at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. She is the author of numerous essays on architecture and art criticism, and her most recent publications include Jaulas y Trampas. Escritos sobre arquitectura y arte 2000-2012 (Lampreave, Madrid, 2013), Textos críticos (Ediciones Asimétricas, Madrid, 2018) and Escritos sobre la invisibilidad (Abada Editores, Madrid, 2018). Furthermore, she has worked as a coordinator and manager of the critical edition of the Aesthetic Interpretation of Megalithic American Statuary. A Letter to the Artists of America. On New Post-War Art by Jorge Oteiza (Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007) and in 2008 received the FAD Award for Thought and Critique for the book Juan Daniel Fullaondo. Escritos críticos (Mairea Libros, 2007).
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. His most recent publications notably include Tecnopastoralismo. Ensayos y proyectos en torno a la Arcadia tecnificada (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2020) and Mobile Theater. Architectural Counterculture on Stage (Actar Publishers, 2021).
Susana Velasco holds a PhD in Architecture and is an artist and lecturer at the Advanced Technical School of Architecture in Madrid. Her works seek to give materiality to the links between communities and landscapes via projects such as Cámara solar / Ermita del santo Isidro in Herreruela, Cáceres, and the Pequeño Museo Comunal in Almonaster la Real, Huelva. These works are part of a long-term research project which aims to articulate sensitivity and awareness around the interdependent world we inhabit and compiles the testimonies of ancient communities. Her work has been on view at a number of institutions, for instance the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Matadero Madrid, La Casa Encendida and the Museo Reina Sofía. Her most recent works notably include research on the Garonne River and the reconstruction of imaginaries which have come together in the work La nave del tiempo: un archivo común. (The Ship of Time: A Common Archive).
Silvia Zayas is an artist who works at the limits of live arts, film and expanded choreography. She searches for hybrid forms of research and artistic production, for instance in her project Jumping Scales (Matadero Madrid, 2018). Her works most notably include Talking pictures (2018), with Esperanza Collado and, from 2021, the films Brilliant Corners, with the collective Orquestina de Pigmeos, Puebla, with María Jerez, and the stage piece U. Recently, she has developed a line of work around the perception of other species and sub-aquatic communication, in collaboration with two marine biologists, Michel André and Claudio Barría, the results of which are displayed in the exhibition ê (in the Depth of Field programme, Matadero Madrid, 2020–2021) and the project ruido ê (Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, 2021–2023).
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Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the
Coordinated by
Fernando Quesada
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Participants
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra
ARCO2045. The Future, for Now
Saturday 7, March 2026 - 9:30pm
The future, its unstable and subjective nature, and its possible scenarios are the conceptual focus of ARCOmadrid 2026. A vision of the future linked to recent memory, a flash of insight into a double-edged sword. This year's edition, as in the previous two, will once again hold its closing party at the Reina Sofia Museum. This time, the star of the show is Carles Congost (Olot, Girona, 1970), one of the artists featured in the new presentation of the Collections recently inaugurated on the 4th floor of the Sabatini Building.
Carles Congost, with his ironic and timeless gaze, is responsible for setting the tone for this imperfect future, with a DJ session accompanied by some of his works in the Cloister on the first floor of the Sabatini Building of the Museo on the night of Saturday 7 March.
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.