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Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Laboratory. Guided tour and meeting
Mapa Teatro
Sabatini Building, Exhibition Rooms – 11:00 am
Laboratory. Guided tour of the exhibition Mapa Teatro: Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity with Mapa Teatro and José Antonio Sánchez (prior registration required)Sabatini Building, Auditorium – 4:00 pm
Laboratory. Encounter with Mapa Teatro (prior registration required)
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Thursday, 4 April 2019 – 7:00 pm
The Living Museum
International premiere
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
International premiere of the performance piece by Mapa Teatro The Living Museum, based on an earlier piece by the collective, The Farewell (2017), which tells the real story of the creation and maintenance of a museum by a group of Colombian soldiers in El Borugo, a former FARC camp located in the Amazon rainforest, where the soldiers re-enact, in front of visitors, the conditions of their imprisoned and tortured comrades from the past.
Mapa Teatro
Performance lecture: The Living Museum and Laboratory
Mapa Teatro. La despedida [The Farewell]. Theatre piece, 2017
Held on 04 abr 2019
The transdisciplinary collective Mapa Teatro explores the mechanisms that build history, myth and fiction. Their theatre pieces, halfway between installations and new dramaturgies, dissect the violence which has so dominated Colombian society in recent years and dismantle the imaginaries created by colonial reason. In conjunction with the unveiling of the exhibition Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, inside the Fissures Programme framework, Mapa Teatro will present a twofold laboratory comprising a guided tour around the show in the morning and an encounter later in the day with José Antonio Sánchez, an Art History lecturer from the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca) and theorist whose work centres on the relationship between performing and visual arts. The program will be completed with the performance lecture The Living Museum on 4 April 2019.
The Living Museum is a performance lecture which, despite taking place in the Auditorium, strikes up a dialogue with the pieces displayed in the galleries, interrelating two spaces, stage and exhibition, which overlap in this collective’s research. Moreover, it reflects upon the use of the museum institution in memory, collective peace processes and the manufacturing of history. The Living Museum also sets out from an earlier Mapa Teatro piece, La despedida (The Farewell, 2017), and is based on the real case of a group of soldiers who created and ran a museum in El Borugo, a former FARC camp, liberated today, located in the Amazon rainforest, where the guerrilla group held kidnapped soldiers and police. In this museum of historical recreation, soldiers now re-stage, under the visitors’ gaze, the conditions of their imprisoned and tortured comrades. Thus, The Living Museum is an interpretation of the relations between fiction, theatricality and reality.
This reflection is expanded upon on 31 October in a laboratory which surveys the creative process of the exhibition held in the Museo and is set in motion with an investigation into the Sabatini Building’s initial use as a hospital. Following on from an artist-led guided tour, audience members will attend and participate in a conversation between the artists and performing arts theorist José Antonio Sanchez as the laboratory illuminates the processes of translating and transposing texts, documents and archives in theatre fictions and devices.
The Living Museum in collaboration with
Laboratory in collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Participants
Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of artists who work on transdisciplinary creation. Founded in Paris in 1984 by Colombian theatre and visual artists Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro has been based in Bogotá since 1986. Their work experimentally extends across performance, installation, opera, theatre and ethnographic film and has been on view at international theatre festivals such as the Avignon Festival, the Paris Autumn Festival and FIND in Berlin, and in art institutions like the São Paulo Biennial and SFMOMA.
José Antonio Sánchez is an Art History lecturer at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca). He is the co-director, with Victoria Pérez Royo, of the MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida, the Teatros del Canal Dance Centre, the Azala Space for Creation and Teatro Pradillo. He is also the author and editor of a broad number of publications on the relationship between performing and visual arts, for instance Prácticas de lo real en la escena contemporánea (2007 and 2012) and Artes de la escena y de la acción en España 1978-2002 (2006).
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
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.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.