TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies

April - July 2023
Patricia Esquivias, Murales de cerámica realizados por Manuel S. Molezún y Amadeo Gabino en 1958 (Ceramic Murals Made by Manuel S. Molezún and Amadeo Gabino in 1958), 2013-2016. Museo Reina Sofía
Patricia Esquivias, Murales de cerámica realizados por Manuel S. Molezún y Amadeo Gabino en 1958 (Ceramic Murals Made by Manuel S. Molezún and Amadeo Gabino in 1958), 2013-2016. Museo Reina Sofía

All forms of life are interdependent, all ecology is relational. Ecological thought is defined though environmental sensibility, where the question around sustainability also encompasses the links between society and nature, questioning the relationships between people, community imaginaries and collective institutions. Thus, a cultural ecology necessitates a relational sense of life as a whole.

The steadily growing awareness of the biophysical limits of the planet entails highly complex understandings of ecosystems as interconnections of living and non-living, human and non-human, past and future elements. From notions of nodes, networks, fabrics and environments, today investigations are carried out around concepts of community understood not as an aggregation of unique elements but as constellations of links, as circulations of ties which self-regulate the production and reproduction of forms of life. Relational ecologies question narratives of human exceptionalism and reveal its colonial and gender-based imaginary: its energy-based sub-conscious, for the separation between ecology and society is established in the dependency on fossil fuels and the techno-military frameworks that administer them.     

This TIZ addresses the problem areas that approach ecology from relationality. Interactions, relations of intimacy and mutual support, forms of collective intelligence, shared knowledge, involvement in protesting against climate change and community learning are some of the concepts that define the activities, activations, investigations and accompaniments from April through to July in the Museo.

Programa

ACTIVITIES

Thursday, 8, and Friday, 9 June 2023 - Check programme
Open Chair
Forms of Thinking

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Arts Degree at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum. It constitutes a space which looks to contribute towards creating an expanded and connected student community of artists and researchers and is linked to the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre. The public programme starts with the presentation of a selection of six final degree works by students from the UOC’s aforementioned Arts Degree, opening a subsequent discussion to share processes, methodologies, questions and learnings related to artistic practice and reflection. This will be followed by a discussion with artist Clàudia Pagès and concludes with a workshop conducted by Patricia Esquivias and Matteo Locci.

Monday, 12 June 2023
On Time and Revolutions
A Lecture by Enzo Traverso

In his work, distinguished historian and intellectual Enzo Traverso explores the relationship between politics and violence in contemporary history from genealogies of Nazism and Europe’s civil wars. His relational understanding of history as a disputed territory confronts mutations of reactionary thought, summoning the legacy of modern critical traditions from an awareness of their crises. This lecture pivots around Traverso’s new book Revolution. An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021), in which he reflects on the historical imagination of revolution and our political relationships with time as experience and culture.

Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the last working day before the activity. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before each concert

Monday, 19, Tuesday, 20, and Wednesday, 21 June 2023
The Aníbal Quijano Chair
Roots, Time and Place

The fifth edition of the Aníbal Quijano Chair features the participation of its director Rita Segato and semiotician Walter Mignolo, setting out, across three sessions, a reflection on the thought and life experience of Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano to enquire about the history of colonial thought and its contemporary need. The complex relationships between raciality, capital and empires, in relation to the place of Iberianness and Latin Americanness in the history of colonialism, are among the concerns of this new edition, which places at its core the community nature of time and the political force of roots.

Thursday, 22, and Friday, 23 June 2023
Conjunctions 0
Encounter around the Study Centre’s Research Fabric

The Museo’s Study Centre puts forward two public sessions based on the first edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme of Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, researchers from different Seminars and Critical Nodes share the work developed up to this point, as well as their future projections, while the group of Resident Student Researchers offers a snapshot of their final projects. These sessions are articulated from workshops and round-tables in which all attendees can participate.  

Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Art and Tourist Imaginaries V
After the Future

This day, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, tackles the climate emergency by imagining a world without tourism. The colossal carbon footprint, linked primarily to transport but also to the production of goods and infrastructures, makes tourism one of the main forces of ecological transformation on a global scale. The difficult task of recomposing relations and ecosystems in a hypothetical post-tourism scenario means to identify practices from which to learn, sensibilities to strengthen, and strategies of speculation and reimagination. The issue of architecture runs centrally through them all.

ACADEMIC PROGRAMME

RADIO RRS