Held on 24 feb 2022
The 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration and supported by MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 24 and 25 February 2022. As an international encounter it sets out to share and debate experiences and research, open new channels of study and reflect upon the institutional management of conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition is held in a virtual format via 20-minute contributions from speakers, followed by a five-minute Q&A session live with the audience. It features participation from universities, museums, art centres, and restorers’ associations, among others.
People who sign up will receive an email with instructions and a link to the online platform enabling them to follow and participate in the event.
- All talks with be streamed bilingually in Spanish and English.
- Questions will be taken at the end of each presentation via the chat.
- For any technical issues during the streaming, please contact: jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es
- Times will be synchronised with CET (Central European Time).
- An attendance certificate will be issued to people registered previously. This certificate must be requested via email by writing to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es from 26 February to 4 March.
Programme
Thursday, 24 February 2022
3:45pm Opening
4pm Presentation and welcome
Jorge García Gómez-Tejedor (head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration), Leyre Bozal (collections conservator in Fundación MAPFRE’s Culture Area) and Mayte Ortega Gallego (coordinator of the 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference)
4:15pm Reflecting Upon the (In)Visibility of the Conservator’s Creative Agency (in English)
Andreia Nogueira (Centro de Tecnologia, Restauro e Valorização das Artes - Techn&Art, from the Polytechnic Institut of Tomar - IPT, Portugal)
4:45pm Discovering a Mexican Suitcase: Characterising a Collection of Work by Pictorialist Photographer Hugo Brehme
Alejandra Nieto Villena (Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico). Co-authors: José Refugio Martínez Mendoza and Álvaro Solbes García (Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico), and Juan Cayetano Valcárcel Andrés (Polytechnic University of Valencia)
5:15pm Eugenio Granell’s Films Newly Preserved
Carolina Cappa (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastián)
Co-authors: Pablo Adiego, Amaia Badiola, Julia Cortegana de la Fuente and Borja Rodríguez Gimeno (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastián).
5:45pm Traditional Pigments in Contemporary Art: Enamel Blue
Patricia de los Reyes Félix (independent restorer)
Co-authors: Beatriz de los Reyes Félix and Marta Plaza Beltrán (Complutense University of Madrid)
6:15pm Presentation of the Work Group Contemporary Art and New Media. Monograph and New Projects from GE-IIC
Rita Amor García (The Spanish Conservation Group GE-IIC)
6:30pm Round-table Discussion. The Evolution of Creation and Documentation Processes in Complex Artworks. The Experience of Kinetic Artist Elías Crespín
Elías Crespín (artist), Jorge García, Carmen Muro, Mayte Ortega and Regina Rivas (Museo Reina Sofía)
—Moderated by: Arianne Vanrell (Museo Reina Sofía)
7:15pm Conclusions
Friday, 25 February 2022
3:45pm Opening
4pm A Paradigmatic Agreement to Conserve Art Stations in Naples. Case Study: Restoring Enzo Cucchi’s Work Untitled in the Salvator Rosa Underground Station
Giovanna Cassese (Accademia di Belle Arti, Naples)
Co-authors: Maria Corbi (Ufficio Patrimonio Artístico, Azienda Napoletana Mobilità - ANM, Naples) and Manlio Titomanlio (Accademia di Belle Art, Naples) and Alfreda Capone (student)
4:30pm Deploying Metal Soaps in Oil Painting. Experimental Methodology to Determine the Influence of Variable Relative Humidity
Marta Pérez Estébanez (Complutense University of Madrid)
Co-authors: Susanna Marras, Ruth Chércoles and Margarita San Andrés (Complutense University of Madrid) and María Antonia García (Cultural Heritage Institute of Spain)
5pm Study Methodology to Determine the Behaviour of Pen Inks Exposed to Radiation
Luis Erick Miraval Gómez (Complutense University of Madrid)
Co-authors: Ruth Chércoles Asensio, Marta Pérez Estébanez and Carmen Pérez González (Complutense University of Madrid), and Ramón J. Freire Santa Cruz (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
5:30pm The Textile Creations of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Henriette Negrin. Their Conservation and Restoration
Silvia Montero (Museo Reina Sofía)
6pm Farewell and conclusion
Submission of Lectures (closed)
[dropdown]
The deadline for submitting lecture proposals ends on 21 November 2021. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es attaching the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to contemporary art conservation and restoration.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the addressed subject matter, which should be stated at the start of the document using a keyword.
- CV and contact details.
The proposals can be presented in Spanish and English and will be evaluated by a scientific committee, which will select the lectures to be presented during the conferences and will determine their possible inclusion in a subsequent publication, which in turn will undergo a second, and definitive, evaluation by the editorial committee.
For online presentations, participants must send their recording in accordance with the technical requirements they will receive upon notification of participation.
[/dropdown]
Collaboration
illycaffèSponsor
The MAPFRE Foundation
![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.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.