Held on 22, 23 Jun 2023
The Museo’s Study Centre organises two public sessions based on the first edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Programme of Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, the team of mobilisers — researchers who drive forward and coordinate, from their different fields, the Programme’s different Seminars and Critical Nodes — share the works developed up to this point and reflect on their predictions. Equally, the group of Resident Student Researchers present their work on posters and in installations and talks with people interested.
The aim of the activity is to share knowledge, learning and projects carried out to date in the different Seminars and Critical Nodes, fibres of a shared research fabric which looks to be projected towards different outlying social, academic and cultural places.
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Juan Andrade is a professor of Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Raquel Arias Careaga is a professor in the Department of Hispano-American Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
David Becerra Mayor is a professor of Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
Kira Bermúdez is a cultural mediator, social pedagogue, translator and occasional writer.
Carme Bernat Mateu is a student researcher who is writing her doctoral thesis at the University Institute of Women’s Studies and in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Universitat de València (UV).
Alberto Berzosa is a researcher with the “Fossil Aesthetics” group from the Spanish National Research Council.
Rubén Blanco Merlo is a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and a member of the Sociología Ordinaria (Ordinary Sociology) research group.
Jesús Carrillo is a professor in the Art History and Theory Department at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
Florencia Claes is the president of the Wikimedia España association.
Claudia Delso is a cultural manager and mediator.
Xavier Domènech is a professor of Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).
Ntone Edjabe is a Cameroonian writer, journalist, DJ and founding editor of the Chimurenga magazine.
Yinka Esi Graves is a dancer and choreographer
José Luis Espejo is a researcher, curator and teacher.
Patricia Esquivias is a storyteller and narrator of events, characters and cultural objects through videos and installations.
Oier Etxeberria is the head of the Contemporary Art Department at the Tabakalera International Centre of Contemporary Culture (Donostia-San Sebastián).
Carolina Fernández Cordero is a professor in the Spanish Literature Department at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
Maite Garbayo-Maeztu is a Serra Hunter professor in the Art History Department at the University of Barcelona (UB).
Antonio García García is a professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Jorge Gaupp is an adviser in the Study Centre from the Public Activities Department at Museo Reina Sofía.
Pablo Jarauta is a professor of Design Theory and Culture at the Instituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Madrid.
Germán Labrador is the director of the Public Activities Department at Museo Reina Sofía.
Matteo Locci is a multimedia artist and architectural researcher.
Luisa Martín Rojo is a linguistics lecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the director of the international interdisciplinary research centre MIRCo (Multilingualism, Discourse and Communication).
Javier Maseda works in the design and development of digital products, and is a lecturer at the Instituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Madrid and at the University of Castilla la Mancha.
Pedro Medina Reinón is a curator and contemporary art critic.
Pedro Oliver Olmo is a head professor of Contemporary History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM).
Jaume Peris Blanes is a professor of Latin American Culture at Universitat de València (UV).
Julia Ramírez-Blanco is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
María Rosón is a professor of Contemporary Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
María L. Ruido is a film producer, visual artist, researcher and teacher.
Tania Safura Adam is a journalist, cultural critic and the founder of Radio África Magazine.
Mabel Tapia is the deputy artistic director of Museo Reina Sofía.
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer, cultural theorist and professor at the Braunschweig University of Art and a Theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute.
Laura Villa is a contract researcher on the Tomás y Valiente programme at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
Jaime Vindel is a head researcher in the “Fossil Aesthetics” and “Energy Humanities” groups at the Spanish National Research Council.
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Thursday, 22 June 2023
9am Presentation
10am First Research Fabric Workshop
12:30pm Second Research Fabric Workshop
4:30pm Activation of Panels and Discussions
Friday, 23 June 2023
9:30am Third Research Fabric Workshop
12:30pm Fourth Research Fabric Workshop
4:30pm Activation of Panels and Discussions
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.