Held on 20 oct 2020
I tear
the throat
they plunged
into my body
Lupe Gómez, Disobedience, 1995
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.
Revolving around themes on the capacity to speak and utter, the violence involved in speaking up, the use and questioning of one’s own voice or the voice of others, feigned or simulated, when it flutters in the undetermined limit between the consideration of truth or lie, this edition of ESTUDIO looks to imagine new forms of listening and recognition. It stops before the perception of voices and sounds — seemingly non-human, produced from a human body — yielding to the attempt to leave oneself — leave verb and language, break the asymmetry between form and content — to search for a mental, vital rhythm, an enduring and shared exhalation.
Over the course of an afternoon and evening, the research of four artists whose work is linked to voice will be presented, prompting an immersive journey through the limits where the word emerges, something half said or unsaid. Delving into a medium from the imperceptible howl of a brief spasm, a sound that coaxes and slows to become song, to become a wail, the physical stirring of phonemes, gestures akin to a sole animal, an over-linguistic effort, to live our relationships from uncertainty and vibration.
In a cumulus of intensities, the journey is set out inside three spaces in the Museo: one of the rooms of the Collection in the historical Sabatini Building, the former site of San Carlos Hospital, founded in the eighteenth century; the Garden; and the Protocol Room, in the contemporary Nouvel Building. The programme is concluded with a preliminary session in the form of conversations with the participating artists, bringing these essays closer to their areas of study.
PROGRAMME
Tuesday, 20 October 2020 / From 10am to 2pm
Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
ESTUDIO in conversation
An encounter that seeks to bring the public in touch with different performance proposals, before they take place, by approaching fields of research that explore the array of projects presented. Thus, it puts forward a common space of learning in the form of a colloquium with speakers associated with the artists participating in the second edition of ESTUDIO. Approached around four conversations, it opens up reflections, formulates questions and shares references to detect and reveal common interests, connections and potential. In short, a journey through the limits where the word emerges.
Thursday, 22 October 2020 / From 5pm to 9pm
Session 1 / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
The Breeze Carries Lies. Niño de Elche
Lenght: 40’
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The breeze carries lies,
And let he who says he doesn’t lie
Tell you he doesn’t breathe
(Spanish folk song)
Heavy flamenco song, long song, song that belongs to someone, stolen voice, afillá (hoarse) voice, the voice this way, a gruff squawk, voice in song, voice of argument, ideal voice, the flamenco song written with spelling mistakes, personal song? The monkey sings from memory, song by right, oral voice, one’s own voice? Imaginary voice or voice of the mad, noisy voice, voice painted, strip back the voice, irate voice, legitimate voice, spiritual voice, voice of yarn, bastard song, regulated song, gifted song, ghostly song, spectral voice, voice of rubbish or voice of truth, sing another tune, common voice? Song of fire, physical voice, bloodied voice, spatial voice, deliberated voice, reflective voice, song of boy or girl, speechless voice, singular voice? Sing with no mouth, truthfully lying voice.
Niño de Elche
There is a lie attributed to forms of art-making, practices from which, paradoxically, a kind of purity or authenticity is demanded. The voice, in its materiality, takes on a channelling of this complexity, showing the being that it is blurred, shaped by impurities, haziness. But maybe it is these textures — those that show the fumbles of speech and thought — that make a being alive and changeable. The Breeze Carries Lies is an experimentation which, as in all experimental processes, is in progress and attempts to speak to us of the voice or voices as body, space and hope. Denying the veracity of the voice is to broaden its conception and thus be able to displace us towards places that encourage us to continue observing the quantity of linguistic, sound, conceptual, spatial and communicative possibilities it offers. Here it is about understanding the lie not as harmful per se, but as something that can grant us the constant possibility of discovering new paths from which to rethink our new forms of social, cultural and political relations.
Session 2 / Sabatini Building, Room 102
Tutuguri. Flora Détraz
Length: 25’
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Produced at the crossroads between the vocal cords and physical movement of the body, in an exercise to “listen” how a dance sounds, Tutuguri is a polyphonic performance that takes its title from Tutuguri. The Rite of the Black Sun (1936), the well-known poem by Antonin Artaud.
Tutuguri explores the asynchronism between movements and sounds, in a perpetual conflict of opposites where the body of the person dancing is inhabited by whispers, animal grunts, child noises, strange sounds, conversations, song, and abdominal sounds that transport us to a spectral landscape of voices, sketching a state of connection between sound flows and affection.
Session 3 / Sabatini Building, Garden
Souffle(s)! [Delusions of (a) Garden]. Loreto Martínez Troncoso
Length: 35’
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Martínez Troncoso responds to the invitation to continue exploring the relationships between action and language, between orality and body gestures, with a proposal conceived for this edition of ESTUDIO, upon which she reflects with the following words:
(And the formulation of these words does not come easily, similar to having a lump in your throat).
I recall a few years back the silence that settled in my throat as I became open-mouthed1… silence from dryness? Today this silence settles through a closed mouth, a full mouth. In a closed mouth no air can get in and, on a du mal à respirer! The nares still remain. What would my nares say if they could speak?
(so much time for so few words to be formulated, although words are not that much because there are many words here inside, but the tension or attention of how one feels at the time… [delirium of a garden])
— …ma bouche est un creux, a garden, a hole, an inside and outside, an over- and underground, land or a den to clear, oxygenate, caress.
(I imagine this coming 22 October with wind, touching and caressing our skin...)
With souffle I entitle or call — perhaps it is a calling — this moment, which in Spanish means: breath, breathing, blowing, wind… and with the exclamation mark of its verb souffler: Blow! Breathe Out! Huff! Puff! Growl! Snort! Breathe! Breathe in! Take a breath! Push! Fly! Fly away!
1Avoir le souffle coupé, literal translation: to be short of breath.
Session 4 / Sabatini Building, Room 102
Speak to Me, Body. Nazario Díaz
Length: 50’
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I propose an act of resistance by tying aspects such as the phonetic transformation of my vocal flow, the notion of circularity or the idea of purging through perseverance, placing my body in collision with language and a certain will for geographical and identity oscillation.
Nazario Díaz
Speak to Me, Body is part of Looking for Pepe, a study that started in 2016 and sets out from the figure of Córdoba artist Pepe Espaliú (1955–1993), unfurling a series of investigations around the body, language and territory.
The work takes its title from the text Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote in conjunction with the exhibition held in Pabellón Mudéjar in Seville in homage to Espaliú in 1994, a year after his death from AIDS-related complications. The interest in how Espaliú developed links between his work and his circumstances, marked by illness, at a social and political period undergoing a major transformation, inspires a work linked to the subject matter that mutates or disappears, and the idea of the erosion and restraint of a body understood as physical and social existence.
Looking for Pepe opens out from the mutual involvement of Jorge Gallardo, Jesús Alcaide, Cuqui Jerez, María Jerez, Isaak Erdoiza and Ion Munduate; and Speak to Me, Body has gestated as research inside the framework of the 2016/2017 MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture and was premiered on 29 November 2018 in Elipsiak, a series curated by Isabel de Naverán for Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.
Force line
Rethinking the museum
Curator
Isabel de Naverán
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsorship
Admission:
Conversations: sold out
Performances: sold out
Punctuality is required given that entry will not be allowed once the first performance is under way. Doors open at 4:30pm
Duration:
Conversations: 4 hours
Performances: 3 hours and 45 minutes
Participants
Niño de Elche (Elche, 1985) is an “inter-disciplinary” artist whose broad-ranging work synthesises strands of genres such as flamenco, rock, contemporary music, freeform improvisation, electronic music, poetry, visual arts and performance. At this intersection of forms and language notably stands his project Vaconbacon, cantar las fuerzas (2011), drawing from the painter Francis Bacon, with the collective Bulos y Tanguerías, and his albums Voces del Extremo (voted best album of 2015 by music critics), Antología del Cante Flamenco Heterodoxo (2018), Colombiana (2019) and albums in collaboration with Toundra (Exquirla) and Los Planetas (Fuerza nueva). Also of note are his diverse performances at the Sónar Festival, with Los Voluble and Israel Galván, and collaborations with performing artists that include Angélica Liddell, Juan Carlos Lérida, Belén Maya and María Muñoz, to name but a few. Moreover, he has published two books, No comparto los postres (2016) and Morbo legítimo (2019), both published by Bandaàparte Editores. In 2019 he was awarded the Inédit Festival Prize for the best Spanish documentary with Niños somos todos (Inner Kids), and he is currently finishing his work based on research into the sonic legacy of Val del Omar with a sound installation entitled Invisible Auto Sacramental. A Sonic Representation from Val del Omar in the Museo Reina Sofía, and his latest record La distancia entre el barro y la electrónica. Siete diferencias valderomarianas, produced by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández.
Flora Détraz (Paris, 1988) is a choreographer and performer who initially trained in classical Ballet and Literature. She studied with Maguy Marin in the National Choreographic Centre of Lyon and completed her training with the Choreographic Study, Research and Creation Programme (PEPCC) at Forum Dança, Lisbon. As a choreographer and performer, she worked with Marlene Monteiro Freitas on the piece Bacantes-Prelude to a Purge (2019). Furthermore, she has worked or studied with artists such as Vera Mantero, Lia Rodrigues, Meredith Monk, Loïc Touzé, Meg Stuart and Jonathan Burrows, all of whom have had some influence on her way of working and her current concerns. Since 2013 she has developed her own research around the relationships between the voice and movement, culminating in pieces like Peuplements (2013), Tutuguri (2016) and Muyte Maker (2018). Her forthcoming creation, Glottis, will be presented in November 2020 at the lkantara Festival in Lisbon, and, subsequently at the December Dance Festival in Bruges.
Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, 1978) works primarily with writing as her subject matter, the word (the act of saying), its tempo, rhythm, (its) silence… taking on the form of publicly “speaking up”, sound pieces, written texts and also interventions in and with spaces. In addition to collaborations with different artists, her work has slowly but surely opened out to other voices, the voices of others, particularly with Opereta A~Mar (2014) Entre[hu]ecos (2017) and El eco de tu voz - l'écho de ta voix (2018). In recent years we have been able to experi-mention her “writings” in her exhibition in CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 2019); her exhalations and song in Chambre n°53, (soupervues, Vaison-la-Romaine, 2018); her sighs and éclats in “Mutaciones: Vidas secretas” (Museo Picasso, Buitrago del Lozoya, 2018); her words and non-words in Ah ha! (PAN! – Privé/Public, IF, Limoges, 2017) and Et la terre tourne, (Parades for FIAC, Paris, 2016); her respirations/expirations in Por dónde comenzar, si est-ce qu’il y a un commencement quelconque (Galería PM8, Vigo, 2017), and her silence in El aire que yo respiro es el aire que tú respiras (Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2016).
Nazario Díaz (Linares, Jaén, 1985) develops his work primarily in the field of performing arts, focusing on the concepts of the body, the gaze and writing. He is part of the collective Vértebro, with Juan Diego Calzada and Ángela López, with whom he curated the festival Beautiful Movers in Córdoba. His experience of the MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, ARTEA and the Museo Reina Sofía has lent him a critical context in which to develop his project Looking for Pepe, which brings together past interests around two main concepts: presence and resistance. As a performer he has worked with, among others, Jorge Gallardo, Isaak Erdoiza and Societat Doctor Alonso. Since the end of 2018, he has lived in Bilbao, where he participates in two collective contexts of learning: PICA, an intensive programme of support for a temporary community of artists and researchers, held in Azala (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and run by Idoia Zabaleta and Luciana Chieregati, and the programme Invitación, a proposal by Coletivo Qualquer to investigate and exchange methodologies and tools from the sphere of live arts. At the present time, he is working on Otro borrado a través de la insistencia, as a solo work, and Conversation pieces, with Basque choreographer Isaak Erdoiza.
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8, 22 OCT, 5, 19 NOV, 3, 17, 31 DIC 2025,14, 28 ENE, 11, 25 FEB, 11, 25 MAR, 8, 22 ABR, 6, 20 MAY, 3, 17 JUN 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
Rethinking Guernica
21, 28, 22, 29 SEP, 5, 12, 19, 26, 6, 13, 20, 27 OCT, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 3, 10, 17, 24 NOV, 7, 14, 21, 28, 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 DIC 2025
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.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
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 two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.