Held on 13, 14, 18 Apr, 25 May 2023
This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.
The title of the activity, When Destiny Catches Up with Us, is a translation of the Spanish translation of Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green, a futuristic vision of the year 2022, when over-industrialisation and overpopulation have pushed the planet to tipping point and caused food shortages. The picture is structured as a police crime drama with its main plot thread the commercialisation of the only food product the population has access to: the plankton-based “Soylent Green”. The film is based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, originally published in 1966.
Our present seems to teeter dangerously close to Fleischer’s fiction: in 2022, Scientist Rebellion, a sister organisation of Extinction Rebellion, warned that the planet had already reached the point of no return. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN), human behaviour has been responsible for the extinction of 60% of wildlife over the last forty years, while the “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi” report, published by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, states that two out of every five plant species are in danger of extinction. Furthermore, the studies carried out by authors in the article “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers”, in the journal Biological Conservation, reveal that the dramatic drop in the world’s insect populations could lead to the extinction of 40% of species in the coming decades. Out of the five previous extinctions, some hypotheses draw parallels between the present and the Permian-Triassic, an extinction that occurred two hundred and fifty million years ago and ended 90% of life through a huge increase in CO₂ in the air. This time, the sixth mass extinction is advancing ten thousand times quicker.
The need to strengthen environmental politics is nothing new. In 1992, the UN organised the Earth Summit in Río de Janeiro, a convention that would lay the foundations for the Kyoto Protocol, approved in 1997, in which industrialised countries committed to limiting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 1999, Bruno Latour, in the book Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, stressed the urgent need to place ecology at the centre of politics, while a few years earlier in Mexico, the Zapatista Movement had already started to show a determined resistance to neoliberalism and its understanding of the Earth as a space for trade and with ecological policies already put into practice that, from Europe and the USA, would later be known as the Anthropocene.
On the basis of the above, this programme — organised in collaboration with TBA21 — comprises the presentation and screening of a documentary, two sound experiences and two conversations that connect, in one way or another, knowledge around the global extinction threatening the Earth.
Thursday, 13 April 2023 – 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
2020: The Walk
—Screening and Presentation by Marta Moreno Muñoz
This encounter presents the project 2020: The Walk by Marta Moreno Muñoz, an artist and activist with Extinction Rebellion, which, as an international social movement, aims to influence environmental policies to mitigate global warming, the loss of biodiversity, the mass extinction of species and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Conceptualised in 2019 and produced in the spring/summer of 2022, 2020: The Walk is the artist’s final project for her doctoral research “Art as an Experience of the Dissolution of the Self. Towards an Artistic Practice in Times of Collapse”. This videographic proposal documents the journey made, largely on foot, across the four thousand kilometres between Granada, in southern Spain, and the Arctic Circle, where the artist connected with climate activists from kindred movements and disseminated the purpose and concerns of Extinction Rebellion, while also giving talks and training on non-violent direct action.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Xoán-Xil, Ariel Ninas and Paula Ballesteros
This speculative essay, based on attentive listening and our current perspective, revisits the myth of bees in popular Galician practices associated with death. Honey bees, a pollinator species threatened with extinction, have been among the most important insects in Western culture, both for their influence on the upper classes, in contemporary Western architecture and eighteenth-century hives, and their importance in funerary rites in traditional and rural societies. For instance, in Galicia, the buzz that bees make, reproduced through the voice, would accompany the dead to the grave. This activity features the intervention of Paula Ballesteros in the staging of the book Abellón. O libro negro das zoadeiras (A Central Folque, 2020) by Xoán-Xil López and Mauro Sanín, a publication that stems from a series of intuitions, readings and investigations around buzzing as a “paramusical” sound with the capacity to reach transcendental value in different cultures. This open and thought-provoking proposal is based on sound experimentation and creation, areas which prompt us to rethink our relationship with “noise”.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 8pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Jana Winderen
This concert conducted by Jana Winderen seeks to showcase the importance of microscopic organisms which, despite being imperceptible, are essential to our planet’s ecology. Winderen, an artist based in Norway, worked on the research “The Soundscape of Anthropocene Ocean” (2021), the results of which were published in an article in the journal Science, with other artists. The text, overseen by Carlos Duarte, sets out the impact of anthropogenic noise produced by humans and the machines they manufacture and use, and how it exacerbates the extinction of sea life, already under threat from rising sea temperatures. These changes could wipe out entire populations of microscopic organisms, affecting the food chain of ocean wildlife and the production of oxygen for global survival. Winderen also studied mathematics, chemistry and ecology focused on fish, her practice focusing more deeply on sound environments and creatures that are inaccessible to humans due to physical or auditory factors such as water depths and ice or the frequency ranges which are inaudible to the human ear. Her work also includes audio-spatial site-specific installations and concerts performed in major institutions and international public spaces.
Tuesday, 18 April 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 1
Conversation between Carlos Duarte and Jana Winderen
Using sound technologies, the research group The Malaspina Expedition, with public funding from Spain and led by Carlos Duarte, recently discovered that 95% of marine biomass can be found in mesopelagic zones (lying between two hundred and one thousand metres below the ocean’s surface). Due to their diminutive size, these fish escape fishing nets and play a key role in biodiversity, along with plankton and predators. According to an article by Helen Scales published in The Guardian on 29 September 2022, the industry has been quick to respond and organisations such as AZTI (Marine and Food Science and Technology), which develops high-impact transformation projects with organisations aligned with the UN, have started to study the possibility of using mesopelagic organisms as a food for commercial fishing species to explore their potential in pharmaceutical production and animal feed.
Thursday, 25 May 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 2
Conversation between Txema Brotons and José Luis Espejo
When, how and why did humans begin listening to whales? Different cultures have heard the songs, roars and bellows of these cetaceans, yet Western culture — which has found beautiful verbs such as “clatter” for the noise storks make — still refers to the “clicks” and “songs” of cetaceans, even though none are exact descriptions. Herman Melville, long before writing Moby Dick, was said to have set sail towards Lancashire and first heard a whale, because many things are often understood through the ears before the eyes.
Listening to Oceans 2 is an encounter which brings together researcher and curator José Luis Espejo and Txema Brotons, a biologist specialised in cetaceans and the director of the Tursiops Association, to consider an archaeology of mediums through which science and other disciplines of knowledge started to listen to and classify cetacean sounds. The encounter continues with a presentation of some of the scientific studies carried out with mediums analysed archaeologically to understand the impact of anthropogenic sound on whales’ communication systems.
Curator
José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
TBA21
Inside the framework of
TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
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.