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
![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.