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Friday, 29 March and 2 April 2019 - 7pm to 9:30pm
Sessions 1 and 2. Mapping Ourselves: Colonisation and Emotional (de)Territory
The first two sessions aim to place the diverse nature of migrant, deterritorialised and racialised identifications through the practices of conversation and the construction of narratives.
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Friday, 26 April and 10 May 2019 - from 7pm to 9:30pm
Sessions 3 and 4. Links and Supports Against Certainty
The second block of sessions explores how the recognition of links and relations of interdependence are produced, and how they are addressed and cultivated through the joyful and melodramatic exploration of affective and activist migrant aesthetics, traversing the ‘migrant struggle’ through the soap opera, music, food, etc.
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Friday, 24 May and 7 June 2019 - 7pm to 9:30pm
Session 5 and 6. Affection in Re-Existence: Towards Shared Living
Session 5 is set up as a ‘talk show’ with guest Hector Acuña/Frau Diamanda, moving towards the (characteristic) rhetoric of the affective migrant and racialised fabrics in re-existence, and towards shared living.
Session 6 focuses on playing and reinventing and is set forth as a loom or collective weft, whereby participants map out their own experiences, making use of different tools and collectively laying out their memories and desires. This encounter is in the mould of a party, a commemoration of our co-existence in Madrid.
Affection in Re-Existence
Held on 29 mar, 12, 26 abr, 10, 24 may, 07 jun 2019
Affection in Re-Existence constitutes an invitation to encounter the affective pathways that envelop migrant memory in Spain. This participatory and open workshop seeks to contextualise conversations and collective learning from an ethical, critical and situated perspective of black, cross-border and decolonial feminism. Its aim is to politicise the different paradoxes shrouding migrant and/or racialised affectivity, acknowledging re-existence as a daily strategy enabling space and time to be creatively inhabited and developed from the experience of transit, body movements and collective memory that knits together the here and there, according to the idiosyncrasies of living in Madrid.
The workshop’s methodological approach is from participatory research/action, employing elements of popular education and combining them with different tools: some start out from the theories and proposals aligned with the decolonisation of the self and the affective shift of social sciences; others stem from art and enable movement in the vague territory of the inside-outside. These politics of space, affective-physical geography and common colonial memory untangle re-existence, encompassing the multiple intersections between the public and the private. Thus, the aim is to question the Eurocentric values that demarcate emotional aspects as an opposite space of reason and, from this register, reveal the ‘Latin drama’, the tenderness, rage, that which is deemed sentimental, pain, cannibalism and stigmatised subjects in urgency, sweetness, and bitterness shrouding everyday dispossession: food, dance, music (bachata, salsa, huayno, cumbia, etc.) as moments of displacement, from what Enrique Dussel calls the European conquiro (‘I conquer’) ego.
Activity included in the programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Affection in Re-Existence is a project developed by the research group Situated Feminisms, associated with the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre and made up of researchers Elisa Fuenzalida and Jeannette Tineo.
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Designed and conducted by:
Elisa Fuenzalida is a feminist migrant and student in the MA in Advanced Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. She coordinates the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre’s Aníbal Quijano Chair with anthropologist Rita Segato.
Jeannette Tineo Durán has worked in the psychosocial field, and research and teaching in the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and Latin America, and has professional experience in popular education, and anti-racist and decolonial feminism. She is currently conducting PhD research into Dominican diaspora in Madrid,
With the collaboration of:
Héctor Acuña/Frau Diamanda is a translator, writer, self-taught audiovisual artist, drag performer, independent curator, cultural infector and DJ who has recently finished the 2017–18 Programme of Independent Studies (PEI) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA).
Aimed at
People with migrant and/or racialised backgrounds or experiences who are interested in reflecting on their life experiences; activists from different associative-collaborative backgrounds who wish to politicise affection; cross-border people and dissidents of desire, sexuality and identities; people seeking spaces of self-care and healing justice through art and (psycho) drama…
Participant selection
The level of interest in the programme content will be assessed above all else. Although the workshop is designed as a mixed, open space, priority will be given to non-EU migrants and racialised people.
Selected participants will receive a confirmation email on 18 March 2019.
![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.