Feminist Revolt in the Museum

In this instance, the Museo sets in motion a new format of expanded mediation: the film society, an initiative which accompanies exhibitions in which audiovisual language takes centre stage. This space of active contemplation, collective thought and mutual learning is built by means of a selection of audiovisual materials from the exhibition Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s  

Programme and session coordination: Miriam Martín
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

Further information

Two key questions have led Bolivian artist, writer and activist María Galindo to develop this performance — an updated version of one presented in the Parliament of Bodies, a project curated by Paul B. Preciado and Viktor Neumann in conjunction with the Bergen Assembly (Norway, September 2019): What are our horizons in the feminist struggle? What or from where do we speak about when we are situated as feminists?

Force line: Action and Radical Imagination and Contemporary Disturbances
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

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As part of the 8 March demonstrations, this new edition of the forum Situated Voices looks at the situation of Moroccan female day labourers who arrive in the fields of Huelva during the strawberry-picking campaigns and are hired from their places of origin.

Participants: Rahma El Basraoui, Fátima Boubkri, Nines Cejudo, Pastora Filigrana García, Justa Montero and Soulaima Vázquez
Organised by: Museo Situado
Coordinated by: Red Solidaria de Acogida, with the collaboration of Comisión artística Colombine, La Extraña Compañía and La Smorfia Teatro
Force line: Contemporary Disturbances
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

Further information

As part of the 8 March demonstrations, this new edition of the forum Situated Voices looks at the situation of Moroccan female day labourers who arrive in the fields of Huelva during the strawberry-picking campaigns and are hired from their places of origin.

Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Attendance: free, with prior registration at inscripciones@museoreinasofia.es

Further information

Through a series of exercises, information exchanges on musical frames of reference, essay and observation, this workshop seeks to create collective choreography that can be replicated in public space, working with movement as an instrument for expression born from enjoyment and the potential of our bodies.   

Line force: Action and Radical Imagination
Attendance: free, with prior registration at inscripciones@museoreinasofia.es

Further information

This programme seeks to analyse how new feminisms, struggles for the recognition and equality of post-colonial subjects and social migratory movements are fashioned as key spaces of resistance before the recent shift towards conservatism, with the activity setting out from the pooling of their experiences after becoming objects of defamation and hate by the new political right. During each encounter, sound artist Mattin will execute a series of Anti-fascist Scores.  

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and Foundation of the Commons. Co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe Programme
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Workshop assistance: free, with prior registration at inscripciones@museoreinasofia.es

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Imagining other ways of life and struggles for autonomy have been exploited by new modes of neoliberal production, whereby life itself (and its dimensions of subjectivity, affection, language, sociality) is at the centre of production value, as asserted by numerous thinkers and artists — Suely Rolnik, Isabel Lorey, Hito Steyerl, Bojana Kunst, and many more. Faced with today’s precarious conditions, self-exploitation and exhaustion, this programme examines the power of art to imagine non-productive, non-instrumental forms and forms of life and relationships.       

Force line: Contemporary Disturbances
Attendance: free, until capacity is reached

Contemporary Disturbances

Via its Pink Triangle encounters, the Museo seeks to consolidate a space of convergence between different agents working in the sphere of affective-sexual and gender diversity in schools. The programme’s third edition features Miquel Missé, a sociologist, trans activist and independent educator who works in the sphere of public policies for diversity.  

Design and coordination: Cristina Gutiérrez Andérez and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca
Attendance: free, with prior registration by writing to actividadesescolares@museoreinasofia.es

A conversation with Spanish artist Concha Jerez in relation to the retrospective Concha Jerez. Our Memory Is Being Stolen. The critique of censorship in the media and a reflection on the workings of repression shape the artist’s work and are captured across multiple supports spanning a number of decades.

Force line: Politics and the Aesthetics of Memory
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

Writer and feminist activist Silvia Federici and activist and domestic worker Rafaela Pimentel, the driving force behind the collective Territorio Doméstico, have maintained a relationship of friendship and political-intellectual affinity since 2009. Both will converse with attendees about the specific struggles of domestic work and care within a capitalist and patriarchal system, and their place (invisible and denied) in reproducing the existing order.   

Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

Participants: Nuria Alabao, Marisa Pérez Colina, Samuel Pulido, Fernanda Rodríguez and Mattin
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and Foundation of the Commons. Co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe Programme
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

An expert in Cultural Studies, Byung Chul Han is a philosopher and essayist from South Korea and a lecturer at Berlin University of the Arts.

Force line: Contemporary Disturbances
Attendance: free, with prior ticket collection at the Museo Ticket Office and on the Museo Reina Sofía website

Judith Butler explores the idea of memory outside hegemonic readings of history and, challenging those who assert that history can only be captured in long narrative reconstructions, she suggests that some of the most brutal periods are more persuasively transmitted through the “little things”.  

Moderator: Clara Serra
Attendance: free, with prior ticket collection at the Museo Ticket Office and on the Museo Reina Sofía website

This series screens documentaries and essay films in order to set forth different ways of approaching memory, exploring the different conflict zones between subjectivity and politics; between left(s), militancy and revolution; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between left(s) and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent democracy.

Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

This seminar spotlights the social unrest that exploded on 18 October 2019 in Chile, shaking the country and causing its political system’s biggest crisis since the return to democracy in 1990. It explores the different dynamics of “revolt” (disobedience, transgression, insurgency, and so on) that gave value to the range of criticism spreading through the country’s cities, with echoing screams of “Chile woke up” and “No more abuses or privileges”.  

Attendance: free, with prior registration by writing to inscripciones@museoreinasofia.es

Carmen Castillo is a Chilean film-maker and a former member of MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left). Exiled to Paris during the military dictatorship in Chile, she made a number of films that thread together a unique and compelling body of work that eschews nostalgia and dominant narratives. Castillo continues to question the nature of political commitment and the possibilities of redirecting the “world’s disastrous path”.   

Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached

A tour around the exhibition Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s, which offers an exploration into the figure of Delphine Seyrig, the French actress, video producer and activist, and the feminist scene to which she held close ties.      

Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached (15 people)
Meeting point: the adjoining area between the Sabatini Building and Nouvel Building, Floor 1

Further information

This activity looks at the space which burst forth across the post-Second World War artistic landscape, affecting not only art-making but also people situated inside the art system (who occupied this space?) and those who were decentred. Through this wandering, people are invited to participate in a relational practice with mediators and other group members with the aim of dismantling the idea of the person “who explains things” and to form a plural voice uttered from feminism.     

Meeting point: the adjoining area between the Sabatini Building and Nouvel Building, Floor 1
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration at the Mediation desk from thirty minutes before the start of the visit (15 people).

Further information

The route map of this activity starts from the learning that stemmed from the feminist movement in its imagining of other forms education and, therefore, inhabiting the world. It aims to reflect upon the accounts comprising art history, identifying violent episodes from a patriarchal logic, prioritising relationships of care opposed to those from power, questioning hierarchies between scientific knowledge and mainstream knowledge, and underscoring the diversity of subjectivities, bodies and identities. 

Aimed at: groups of students from Primary, Secondary and Sixth Form Education and over 65s
Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Floor 1, education desk
Attendance: free, with prior registration by writing to visitasescolares@museoreinasofia.es

Further information

Inside the framework of Our Many Europes — Europe’s Critical ‘90s and The Constituent Museum (OME), run by the European museum confederation L’Internationale, the Museo has opened a call for three research residencies to support research, artistic production and archive work.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and L’Internationale. Co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe Programme.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination

Further information

 In the first episode of a project of feminist cartographies with which to foster connections between feminist struggles in different contexts, a mapping of Morocco gets under way and is structured around three core questions: Which feminist collectives, women’s collectives and gender dissidences are active in the territory today? Which practices, debates and challenges do these groups consider among them and with Moroccan society? What are the connections that can be made with the reality facing Mediterranean Europe?

Participants: Hanan Dalouh Amghar and Maggie Schmitt
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and Laboratoria – Feminist Research Space

This study group shares common forms of collective and daily resistance in opposition to the growing alliance between the pharmaceutical industry, economic power and neoliberal logic. By means of an approach to alternative knowledge hailing from the Global South, the activity seeks to debate life management and care policies, and encourage a knowledge exchange through non-hegemonic, transversal and affective practices.    

Coordinated by: Equipo re - Anarchivo sida (Nancy Garín and Linda Valdés)
For dates and times, please check programme

Further information

The aim of this study group is to encourage a mixed collective reflection from the knowledge and tasks that emanate from politicised maternal bodies. Through dynamics of self-enquiry and actions rooted in feminist critical theory, the sessions put forward an intimate revolution as a strategy of peaceful emancipation and as a way to oppose exclusion and the devaluation systematically attributed to maternal work.    

Coordinated by: Luisa Fuentes Guaza
Attendance: free, with prior registration

Further information

In the late 1960s and the decade that followed, feminism became an international lingua franca around which the work of many artists revolved. In Spain, despite the dictatorship, these radical discourses incorporated a Pop Art with a local flavour and an anti-Francoist discourse. If, however, during those two decades the work of artists was disseminated widely, the same could not be said for the work of recently recovered, same-generation female counterparts. This microsite, therefore, contextualises and places these women artists’ work, seeking to counteract a male-art-dominated historiography. 

La producción de Miriam Cahn (Basilea, 1949) emerge fuertemente influida por los movimientos feministas y pacifistas de los años sesenta. Desde el inicio de su trayectoria en los años setenta, se ha interesado por temas cruciales que van a recorrer todo su trabajo, como la guerra, la violencia, la familia, la muerte, la sexualidad o la defensa feminista.

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Since the start of her career, Natalia Iguiñiz (Lima, 1973) has worked closely with different women’s collectives and feminist movements in Peru. In these projects, she studies how the containment of women’s sexual and reproductive rights creates major tensions inside a Peruvian cultural and social context. 

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Composer-performer and human rights activist Meira Asher (Ireland) has made a sound piece exclusively for Museo Reina Sofía Radio that addresses the conflict in the Gaza Strip. In the piece, the artist accompanies Akef and Walid, two Palestinian farmers, while they enter land held under Israeli military control to collect olives from their olive trees. Via a composition led by her own voice, Meira transports us to Kufr Qaddum, the place of conflict.  

Listen capsule

Since the autumn of 2018, Bill Dietz (Arizona) and Hong-Kai Wang (Taiwan) have conducted research into the relationships between song and the concepts of work and value. In their contribution to Museo Reina Sofía Radio, we witness the essays of a group of people who attempt to learn how to sing songs in different languages, with these encounters allowing Dietz and Wang to touch on themes such as reproductive work, migration and spiritual work, doing so from a mise en scène of listening and the search for experimental modes of socialisation through sound and orality.   

Listen capsule

In this room, two lines of research which are key to the Museo Reina Sofía Collection converge: the context of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, and the recovery of the work of women artists, often ignored or obscured by the work of their male counterparts. The role of women during the Civil War was at once active and diverse, most notably exemplified in Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912 – Mexico City, 2000) and Gerda Taro (Stuttgart, 1910 – El Escorial, 1937), photographers who travelled to Spain to cover the armed conflict, disseminating their work in national and international publications such as Umbral, Regards and Die Volks-Illustrierte. In the sphere of visual arts, figures such as Pitti (Madrid, 1908 - Pamplona, 2004) and Juana Francisca (Madrid, 1911–2008) created graphic art to the backdrop of war, while the role of workers and militiawomen to serve the cause was broadly depicted in different media. 

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This exhibition revisits the history of the feminist movement in France through the emergence of video collectives in the 1970s, focusing on a network of creative alliances that emerged at a time of great political unrest. Films, videos, artworks, photographs, documents and archive materials show the concerns the feminist movement exposed at the time, concerns which still resonate today in the ongoing construction of alliances against structural sexism in the film industry and the challenge to normative gender roles.

Curator: Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Giovanna Zapperi
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, in collaboration with LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut), and Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir

Further information

This exhibition presents the works of artist Concha Jerez (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1941), produced in a period spanning from the 1970s to the present, recovering and surveying her work from a perspective in which the artist’s personal memory and collective memory intersperse — anonymous memory and memory reflected in the media. The Spanish Civil War and its subsequent repression, censorship in the Transition to democracy in Spain, the vindication of forgotten, anonymous figures — women, migrants — and the relationship between memory and its repression are some of the issues explored and which enter into dialogue with the Museo’s own history and its previous state as a hospital.

Curator: João Fernandes
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Further information

Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–1987) viewed rhythm as a structural element of painting, a rhythm stemming from the employment of specific materials — metal foil, gold leaf, silver, copper — forms, lines and colours. Her relationship with Spain began in 1933, when she lived in Menorca for a year with her partner, Hans Hartung. In 1962, she travelled to Almería, a trip that would be instrumental in defining her work — it was the location of her first horizon pieces, a motif she would return to when she once again painted Norwegian landscapes. This link between Norway and Spain – north and south – led to similarities in formal terms, but with very different tones, between both landscapes.

Curators: Nuria Enguita and Christine Lamothe
Organised by: Bombas Gens Centre d’Art/Fundació Per Amor a l’Art and Fondation Hartung-Bergman, in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía

Further information