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Thursday, 13 October 2022 Nouvel Building, Study Centre
To See What We Hear
Seminar by Alexandra T. Vázquez
RegistrationThis encounter takes place in two parts: the first presents, through a set of surprise objects, certain ways of incorporating the intuitive revelations that underly thought and the writing of each one into research practice. How can we capture those small and difficult fragments of the ephemeral which can influence us by making our erudition sharper? What can we do when the archive disappoints? What or who should we go to when we want to break the relationship between who we are and our objects of study? These are a few of the questions addressed here.
The second part explores the interview format and its relationship to biography. Understood as a genre, the interview enables us to speak to people about writing, which in turn becomes a device which is able to take research in fascinating directions.
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Friday, 14 October 2022 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
To Hear What We See
Lecture by Alexandra T. Vázquez
TicketsWhat would happen if music were a usual, expected and key component of any project and format from the art world? And if, for instance, the absence of music upon contemplating a painting or performance was perceived as uncomfortable restraint out of harmony with people? This lecture advocates music as a carrier of landscapes, extraordinary difficulties, seriousness and of vital and visceral knowledge with huge importance for education. In other words, with dimensions that go beyond the pleasure or usual physical enjoyment associated with music.
This lecture seeks to transit the different songs which illustrate and reveal how music manages to create visionary relations towards and between objects and different forms of expression. Music does not appear as “something that must be studied” from the acquisition collections of any museum, but is instead “something that must be brought” from productions on the street, in the cabaret or in the conservatoire. Music, built sound by sound across the centuries, can activate and expand, to a large degree, the way in which we perceive its aesthetics — and with teachings that take us far and wide. This is documented by the strident examples in this lecture, which come from Havana, the state of Bahía and al-Ándalus.
Held on 13, 14 Oct 2022
The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites Alexandra T. Vázquez, an associate professor of NYU’s Institute of Performing Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts, to participate in its programme of master lectures, an annual event which reflects upon the historiography of art, coinciding with the start of the academic year of the MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, organised jointly by the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía.
The programme for this edition includes a seminar and a lecture concerning music’s relationship with different experiences, objects and spaces, and also the methods, modes and approaches around what we feel we know about the visual.
Alexandra T. Vázquez is a researcher, writer and associate professor in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). Her study focuses on music, race and ethnicity, and she has worked at Princeton University (2008–2015) and been a postdoctoral researcher on the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University (2006–2008). Moreover, she has published numerous works in academic journals and publications, and her first book Listening in Detail: Performance of Cuban Music (Duke University Press, 2013) won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize in 2014. More recently, she has published The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022) and is currently working on her next project: Music and Migrancy: Sounds Out of Place.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
Inside the framework of
TIZ 5. Phantasmata
Más actividades
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.
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.
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.