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Wednesday, 13 December 2023 Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Room 102
FIGURY (przestrzenne). Ola Maciejewska
Choreographer Ola Maciejewska has conducted in-depth research into Loie Fuller (Illinois, 1862 — Paris, 1928), one of the most innovative and recognised women dance artists in modernism. Maciejewska’s piece Loie Fuller: Research (2011), was performed in the Museo Reina Sofía in the spring of 2018 and involved a succession of physical exercises which used the “dancer’s dress” invented by Fuller in a piece which tautened and related the sculptural with the figure that sculps and dances the fabric. And thus the idea of physical strength and endurance (necessary to hold the weight of large fabrics) revealed a unique concept of dance and the figure of the dancer: that of a body always related to other bodies and living or lifeless bodies.
FIGURY (przestrzenne) [FIGURE (SPATIAL)] broadens and gives continuity to these investigations, comprising a dance solo that enquires about the body’s relationship with its environment, which tries to incorporate, via gestures and movements, a series of porous sculptures or figures that come into direct contact with space or which, going further, are built by it. Corporeal work is activated around the sense of the deceleration of time and the idea of physical resilience; the search entails inhabiting, adapting, listening and producing new relationships between the body and that which surrounds it to reveal not only spaces but also co-existent temporalities. The interest in the sculptural in this piece is not only related to the artistic discipline but also the question around the commitment a body acquires to its more immediate — spatial, architectural, institutional, affective, physical, sensitive — environment. Maciejewska thus stresses the idea that all elements of the space in which the piece unfolds “develop verbs” that participate in the action and modify its state: a wall, an artwork, a cold marble floor, a dog, a tree, a spectator.
The word “przestrzenne” means spatial figure in Polish and, consequently, FIGURY (przestrzenne) alludes to the way in which the body is always dependent on something that extends beyond it, much in the same way that plants depend on light. This dependence is based on a double concealment: something we intuit as different from the human but actually exists within it.
Credits:
Concept and performance: Ola Maciejewska
Production: Caroline Redy. So We Might As Well Dance
Co-production: CND Pantin, Cndc Angers
Residencies: Pact Zollverein, Muzeum Susch (Acziun Programme)
Project carried out with funding from the Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles (DRAC) Bretagne – Support for choreography projects.
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Thursday, 14 December 2023 Sabatini Building, Garden
ágidxen. Josu Bilbao
ágidxen is a phonetic transcription of a dialectical variation of the adverb agerian, which in Basque is a derivative of the verb ageri, an important element in the Basque language and epistemology. Possible translations of the verb ageri are: visibly, revealingly, either in public or openly, yet it is a term which, in this instance, refers to the learning acquired by the artist in the environment of the home to refer to the specific circumstance in which a member of the family becomes uncovered at night.
This fact (to become uncovered) prompts a simple form of care in that another person covers them, whether in the middle of the night or in the morning. It is a circumstance that is named — and is comprehended without any need for explanation — through the word ágidxen, which when pronounced creates a specific sound. It is a form of speech which transmits a particular state and makes the word and the tongue a shared place between bodies and voices.
A body is uncovered, unprotected, like a call to be assisted by others. The tongue, as a muscular organ of the mouth, is also exposed at the time of pronouncing words. To speak, say and name is to put the tongue (anatomical and linguistic) in contact with the air. To leave the tongue exposed, openly. ágidxen throws into relief phonation to observe how each sound is developed in the body, understanding that the voice is body and matter and here, in the Museo’s Garden, it is also foliage and half-light. Equally, it looks to be conscious of the time of emission and the semantic landscapes, at times abstract, that this invokes.
The act of creating sound through the voice, as a physical occurrence, also stirs an awareness of other forms of presence. Firstly, orality which, as a collective practice, notices and makes us notice what we are, producing memory and developing history. And secondly, because the space of action and pronunciation are shaped with the vibration of musical composition, in this instance produced by Estanis Comella. The different morphologies of voice and sound are envisaged, remaining in the air or covering themselves in an action of listening and mutual care. Phonemes, words, phrases, ambient sound, air, birds and whispers open mental, imaginary and physical spaces. They make reality.
Credits:
Performance: Josu Bilbao and Estanis Comella
Supported by the Department of Culture and Linguistic Policy of the Basque Government, ágidxen had a first stage, askiè altu, held in the auditorium of the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, in Bilbao, within the framework of the Urak dakar encounters, curated by Bulegoa z/b.
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Thursday, 14 December 2023 Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Room 102
Lo que baila (What Dances). Paz Rojo
“The coherence and persistence of Paz’s work has brought about vast and fruitful constellations crossed with questions on what dance does and the affective, political and aesthetic framework of choreography and its relationship to the forces and impulses of the capitalist system, with a view to delving into the possibility of a mode of subjectivation extracted from its regime of value production”.
Andrea RodrigoLo que baila (What Dances) seeks, through a modus operandi rooted in dance, to make something present that is not there, since it has already been there and because, in not being, it is kept latently as an event to come, and can re-appear at any time and in many forms. This form, Paz Rojo tells us, is a found form, “a print or residue that can be enjoyed selflessly”.
This piece gathers and mobilises findings, also making them appear and disappear, and stays in continuous movement, akin to the movement of consciousness, which goes from one thought and observation to the next, without staying with any of them, letting them circulate in disregard, sliding in the direct sense of physical dance. It opens feelings and meanings that are dissociated from the aspiration of a characteristic subjectivity. To dance de-subjectivation to exhaustion. Letting, by doing so, the vibrating contours to be perceived of a body that does not end where the skin ends.
Credits:
Concept, dance and sound space design: Paz Rojo
Sound editing: Paz Rojo and Emilio Tomé
With the support of the Festival Domingo-La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2021) and programmes of stage creation residencies at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid) and Köttinspektionen Dans (Uppsala, Sweden).
Held on 13, 14 Dec 2023
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the fifth edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats 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. From the specific nature of curation and gazing through an experimental prism, ESTUDIO sets out to perceive artistic work as a learning process of what is as yet unknown, incorporating meaning around space — the studio as a place of work and experimentation — and essay — a commitment to opening the uncertain from its alliance with language and its functioning as proof of all that we assume we know.
Under the title In the Recess, Occurrence, this edition turns its attentions towards cavities, both mental and physical, that open in our bodies after the passing-through of other bodies. As porous beings we live in constant relations and exchange with others, not only because we are social, or because we inhabit the planet — filled with other living beings — but because we are the planet. And its history. As part of this planet-being, the proposals in this edition of ESTUDIO take on a poetic responsibility, with Ola Maciejewska, Josu Bilbao and Paz Rojo assaying material forms that are poetic, physical and anatomical, and which entail passing through knowledge knowing that results are not guaranteed.
That which surrounds us — space, people, living beings, a tongue, a language, a form of speech, its sound — produces a sensitive print in our muscles, glands, organs and all that defines us as human animals. Yet our bodies, drawing from Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body (2017), do not end where our skin ends. The skin has long been that “inviolable frontier” which invites and pushes, where “you are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself — to be whole, to be one”. In her book, Hildyard suggests that all living beings in fact have two bodies: the animal body demarcated by its skin and a “second body” formed by neuronal, sensitive and affective connections which we maintain with a broad network of ecosystems that involve us in the global development of the planet.
Yet what remains of everything that has left its impression on us, that has left a physical impression on our bodies? The recesses endure, those spaces where the living memory of events and the relations that surround us is encapsulated. Remaining connected to these cavities means to exercise some resistance, not understood as the action of opposing something but rather the capacity of a body to hold the weight — physical, psychological, emotional — of that which it wants to last. It is to walk with such weight, to speak with it, with the force of that desire.
What can be shared of that which remains affixed, that which one carries? To whom does it belong? The different proposals contained within this fifth edition bring to light how an awareness of the connection of the body with life, understood as an occurrence that exceeds biography (and also contains it), prompts thought around the hollows we can open via our gestures, between movements and the displacements of extremities, and also in the movement of the tongue, that organ which, in the act of speaking, comes into contact with the air. The cavity of the mouth, that recess which allows for its sound and transmission. Whoever listens perceives its sense in relation to the ear and the mind, recording, in unsuspected ways, its affective effects, the affection of how to say something in a given moment, and, when it was said previously to the person who now transmits it, a sense that can only be understood in certain contexts.
The movement of bodies progressively opens spaces along the way, accommodating hitherto unperceived forms and temperatures. It is in the recess where the possibility of other forms of presence — physical or psychological, present, past or future and undoubtedly material — occur. And it is in the occurrence of direct action where other modes of temporality are also made possible, temporalities that are hard to restrain, qualities and textures that tilt back and forth between the internal and the external, or where these notions of inside/outside are no longer opposed. In view of the above, this edition encourages participation in a shared experience to live in, for an afternoon/evening, the cavities — gestural, dance-related, linguistic — to observe how time unfolds durée réelle (real duration), a concept vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson defined as a succession of qualitative changes that penetrate without a precise contour.
ESTUDIO V. In the Recess, Occurrence, therefore, continues along the line of previous editions: Estudio I (2019), Half Said, Unsaid (2020), Go Out to Encounter. Speak to Place (2021) and Second Skin. Subcutaneous (2022). In each of these editions, the practical research of guest artists served as conceptual triggers to trace a non-linear path around the voice as materiality; the blurring of subjectivity; the willingness for dialogue with landscape, the environment, places and other living beings; and awareness of a subcutaneous historical memory or the capacity to withstand sensitive impressions. Therefore, the presentations unfurled by Maciejewska, Bilbao and Rojo will take place across two consecutive afternoons/evenings inside the spaces of the Sabatini Garden and Room 102 in the Museo, constituting an invitation to observe, think and feel together, to witness the world from the minimal and proximate gestures it contains.
Curator
Isabel de Naverán (ARTEA)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Josu Bilbao sets out from the persistent orality in certain languages that are dying out to expand his work towards sculpture as a practice which produces physical and sensorial spatiality. He has carried out exhibitions and collaborations in spaces and institutions such as Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), Halfhouse (Barcelona), etHALL (Barcelona), Carreras Múgica (Bilbao), Centro Párraga (Murcia), Centro Botín (Santander), CentroCentro (Madrid), Museo de Bellas Artes (Bilbao) and Tabakalera (San Sebastián).
Estanis Comella currently develops work in which writing and musical production converge, along with other disciplines, using live performance as a medium to create an ephemeral architectural atmosphere in spaces. He has shown and performed his work, among other spaces, in Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), Tabakalera (San Sebastián), Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), CentroCentro (Madrid), Bombon Projects (Barcelona), etHALL (Barcelona), La Panera (Lleida), Carreras Múgica (Bilbao) and Azala (Lasierra).
Ola Maciejewska is a choreographer and researcher who was born in Poland and lives in Paris. In 2012, she gained an MA in Contemporary Theatre and Dance from the University of Utrecht. In addition to a number of academic explorations, Maciejewska has performed the pieces Loie Fuller: Research (2011), Bombyx Mory (2015) and Dance Concert (2018), which have been presented in contemporary dance and art contexts in Canada, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and Taiwan. From 2016 to 2018, she was an associate artist at the centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie (France).
Paz Rojo is a choreographer, dancer and researcher whose interests revolve around dance and its potential to create alternative ecologies that include debates on the ontology of dance in late capitalism and the aesthetics of dance after the end of the future. She attained a PhD in Performance Practices, specialising in Choreography, from the Stockholm University of the Arts with the research thesis The Decline of Choreography and Its Movement: a Body's (path)Way (2019). As part of this research, she published the book To Dance in the Age of No-Future (Circadian, 2020).
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 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.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.