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21 February, 2017 Museo Reina Sofía, Edificio Nouvel, Centro de Estudios
Internal work session
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22 February, 2017 ARCO Madrid 2017, IFEMA, Forum Auditorium, Pavilion 9, Museum Forum
Museum, culture or industry?
Public debate with João Fernandes, Achim Borchardt-Hume, Catherine David and Gabriel Pérez Barreiro.
Venue: ARCO Madrid 2017, IFEMA, Forum Auditorium, Pavilion 9, Museum Forum
6th Meeting of European and Latin American Museums
Nouvel building views, Auditorium 200, Museo Reina Sofía
Date and time
Held on 21 feb 2017
In conjunction with ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía sets up an encounter between different professionals from European and Latin American museum institutions. The aim is to create synergies, promote joint institutional projects and put forth a reflection on the role of museums at the present time.
Today, contemporary art museums face new challenges arising from a globalised society in which the market plays down the legitimising role of the museum institution with respect to the artwork. This premise becomes clear in certain systems of funding which favour the private over the public, and with the ensuing proliferation of auctions, art fairs and other international events that champion private collecting. On the other side, and a by-product of the above, the logic of cultural tourism and the international movement of audiences and viewers imposes visibility as a condition of affirming the museum, reducing its chances of working on key yet also largely invisible aspects, for instance research and the production of knowledge.
Indeed, research is a vital issue in the operation of the contemporary art museum, encompassing diverse and vitally important areas such as the study of collections, the exploration of local and international art contexts, the coordination of internal departments, the programming of public activities and the drawing up of collaborative projects between different institutions. Nevertheless, in view of the constant pressure museums are under, tasks which produce a visible, fast and quantifiable return often take precedence over research. Thus, the event holds sway in the process, imposing a permanent demand of the present and leaving no room for the characteristic temporalities and methodologies in research.
Another aforementioned aspect is the production of knowledge, and its necessity in addressing the role contemporary art museums play in society and the strategies they can adopt to advocate frameworks of critical and collective reflection outside of marketing and performance. Currently, the possibility that new walls diminish and isolate art knowledge and artistic practices is a risk illustrated by recent events such as the US elections, the referendum on Brexit or the resurgence of xenophobic ideas in different parts of the world. This then raises the question: Can the museum be a place of discussion and action on these issues?
The 6th Encounter between European and Latin American Museums seeks to reflect on these unanswered questions by confronting ideas and practices, identifying problems and possibilities, building common projects and opening new perspectives of doing in museum institutions.
In collaboration with
Curatorship
João Fernandes
Organised by
ARCO Madrid 2017 and Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
João Fernandes. Artistic Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Nekane Aramburu. Director, Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca
Vicenzo de Bellis. Curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Catherine David. Deputy Director, National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou, Paris
Mela Dávila. Director of Public Activities, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Oier Etxeberria Bereziartua. Responsable of Artistic Projects, Tabakalera Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea, San Sebastián
Gabriel Pérez Barreiro. Director, Colección Patricia Phelps Cisneros, New York
Juan Gaitán. Director, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
Julieta González. Chief Curator and Interim Director, Colección Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Inti Guerrero. Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art, Tate Modern, London
Nydia Gutiérrez. Chief Curator, Museo de Antioquía, Medellín
Marta Mestre. Curator, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Inhotim, Brumadinho
Cuauhtémoc Medina. Chief Curator, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City
Adriano Pedrosa. Artistic Director, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo
Carlos Prieto del Campo. Director of Studies Centre, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Ane Rodríguez Armendariz. Director, Tabakalera Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea, San Sebastián
Dirk Snauwaert. Director, Wiels. Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
![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.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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.