-
4 October - 30 November 2023 Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Laboratories
These laboratories are articulated from the concept of ruin, interweaving the temporal patterns of adults-senior citizens and adolescents-young people with the aim of making a third transitory, mutant and anachronistic place emerge. As part of this consideration, the aim is to advocate the communication between the bodies we were, the bodies we are and the bodies we are not. From the sensitive dimension of touch, we transmit, from one body to another, the visible and the invisible aspect of “things” (materials, structures, surfaces, affects, sensations, images). Moreover, we experience the material and sound dimensions of things that have all but disappeared or been forgotten. Things detained, those whose “scarcity awaits”; things whose survival allows for two vital attitudes: attention and listening. vitales: la atención y la escucha.
The laboratories are structured around six sessions aimed at two age groups. In the first phase, each group will work separately and, in the second, both temporalities/groups will come together to continue the practices generated with a view to carrying out a stage experiment to be shared with visitors on the final day of the laboratory. escénico que compartiremos con el público el último día del laboratorio.
Wednesday, 4, 18, and 25 October - from 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for teenagers and young people from the ages of 15 to 25Tuesday, 3, 17, and 24 October - from 10:30am to 2pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for people from the ages of 60 to 80Wednesday, 15, 22, and 29 November – 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 2 with both groups together -
Wednesday, 29, and Thursday, 30 November Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Encounter. Not Yet, Still
Over the past year, artists Paz Rojo, Javier Cruz, Paulina Chamorro, José Luis Baringo and physicist Álvaro García have been meeting once a month around the book Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), by philosopher Federico Campagna. This encounter sees the group opening its doors to other people with an interest. (Enclave de Libros, 2022), del filósofo Federico Campagna. En este encuentro, el grupo abre sus puertas a personas interesadas.
From art, and more specifically from the sphere of performing arts and dance, and in the company of the metaphysical imagination offered both by Campagna’s text and other frames of reference, this reading day prompts a questioning of the modes of possible “worldification” (referring to world-building). Mindful of the fact that the job of art is not to predict the future but be capable of “seeing” the present or understanding future potentiality, what do we need to make it possible? Therefore, the encounter constitutes an invitation to think about this question and to ruminate on its ethical implications, going back to the sphere of the intuitive sensation of aesthetics and, consequently, picking up once again the Greek meaning of theatron, which alludes to a “place to see and listen rather than communicate”. To worldify, we need a theatre which enables us to develop forms of “opening our eyes” to reality after having “closed” them. Also bearing in mind that, far from being an active and conscious process, “seeing” is the capacity to recognise in us the wonder and mystery produced by listening to a terribly silent field: the encounter with an interior that was hitherto unknown to us.
-
Wednesday, 29 November Sabatini Building, Room 102
Stage Experiment
TicketsThis experiment brings together the retrospective memory of senior citizens and the projects and plans that are inherent in adolescence and youth with the aim of establishing visions around a spectral future. Participants seemingly destroy-build a set design around them: joining useless objects or those which have become isolated from use, abandoned things, things that are waiting, forgotten objects or other objects accompanying them right now. Materials which make up a skein of cultural memories, of dances which are scarcely the shadow of a tenuous recollection, of voices and sounds that allow the melody to be heard, in which the lived, that which survives and that which is to be lived emerge.
The experiment is the result of laboratories developed within the framework of Not Yet, Still, and features Nilo Gallego’s soundscape in collaboration
-
Thursday, 30 November Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Open Conversation between Federico Campagna and Paz Rojo
TicketsMorir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
Morir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
The idea of prophetic culture articulates this open conversation between Federico Campagna and Paz Rojo, together with the reading group and audience in attendance, to unpick the reflections and practices embodied during the programme Not Yet, Still.
Language: English
Held on 04 oct 2023
Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation, research that is part of Rojo’s broader project Morir Bien (Die Well), which draws inspiration from contemporary materialism and ecological thought to explore the encounter with declining historicity in the present time by way of the relationship between dance, the unknown and aesthetic experience. de la historicidad de la época actual, a través de la relación entre la danza, lo desconocido y la experiencia estética.
In the current context, besieged by crisis thinking and successive forms of epistemic violence, Not Yet, Still seeks to explore the dismantling of our time from the conceptual figure of ruin. What senses are opened before the presence of a time, a body and a stage on the verge of falling? Through ruin, we can delve deeper into the aesthetic scope of a time which, catastrophically and tragically, does not belong to us. As temporal and material figuration, ruin dissolves time for us, allowing us to start after the end: to listen to the remains, to what is left in spite of it all. Through ruin we let ourselves fall and contribute to the demolition of narratives and paradigms which weave our era; we open ourselves to the time of everything we are not and situate ourselves on a post-contemporary stage, ultimately experiencing an encounter with the aesthetics of a strange and immensely open time: a time which has, at the same time, a future and spectral quality.
Morir Bien Morir Bien is a project funded by Madrid City Council’s grants for contemporary creation. With the support of the residencies programme Notar, promoted by the MAR Platform (Museo Reina Sofía, hablarenarte and Fundación Daniel and Nina Carasso, Madrid); Radicantes (IVAM, Valencia); Festival Citemor (Portugal); Live Arts Laboratory, Tenerife Lab (Tenerife); the Los Barros Centre of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid) and the Notes for a Time Apart programme (Museo Reina Sofía).
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
Participants
Federico Campagna is a philosopher, and the author of The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013), Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He is an associate fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), a critical fellow of Royal Academy Schools (London) and a lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL (Lausana), as well as the host of the literary podcast Overmorrow's Library, produced by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. Furthermore, he works as a rights director at the UK/US radical publisher Verso Books and is the co-founder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo.
Paulina Chamorro works in the field of performing arts as a producer, performer and programme co-ordinator for theatres and institutions in Chile and Spain. Since 2009, she has worked independently and in collaborative pieces-projects which explore the creation of sensitive knowledge through experimental stage formats, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation, capitalism, expanded stage practices and post-modernism. Notable among her works are Ser Paisaje (NAVE, Santiago de Chile, 2021), Exuberante Hueco Hacer Lugar (Bosque Real, Madrid, 2022), VAHO (The Online Platform of Ongoing Research, 2022) and Una vibración casi imperceptible (CA2M, Móstoles, 2023).
Javier Cruz is an artist who develops his work through collaborative projects, both in his individual practice and as part of collective structures such as Elgatoconmoscas and PLAYdramaturgia. He also works with performing arts professionals, normally as a performer. Alongside Jacobo Cayetano (Zuloark), he created Bosque Real, a platform to safeguard forgotten heritage and to once again narrate it from multiple perspectives of retrieval. Moreover, with Fernando Gandasegui, he runs Bar Yola, an intersection between live art and pedagogies. His work has been part of collective shows such as Querer parecer noche (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018) and individual exhibitions like Trémula (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), and has featured in art centres, festivals and national and international theatres. (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), así como en centros de arte, festivales y teatros nacionales e internacionales.
Nilo Gallego is a musician and artist whose work always contains a playful strand, searching for interaction with the environment and everyday life. He designs tools and conducts education workshops based on listening and sound creation. cotidiano. Diseña herramientas e imparte talleres educativos basados en la escucha y la creación sonora.
Álvaro García holds a degree in physics from the University of Salamanca (2011). He is currently an associate professor in the area of Applied Physics at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid). His research work pivots round non-linear physics and chaos theory, classic electrodynamics and the foundations of quantum mechanics, as well as stochastic processes with applications to biology. His most recent works have focused on studying how extensive electrodynamic bodies generate electromagnetic waves through the phenomenon of self-oscillation. His research has been published in journals such as Chaos Solitons & Fractals and forums that include NoLineal 20-21 (Madrid) and NODYCON 2023 (Rome).
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).
![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 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.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
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.
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.