Held on 09 mar 2024
This encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. The texts, gathered in the volume Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024], edited by Aurora Carmenate Díaz, are the pretext for celebrating the forms of making and the networks Díaz Bringas wove throughout her life.
Díaz Bringas lived and worked for a decade in Costa Rica and the last thirteen years of her life in Spain. Always engaged with the networks she helped to entwine wherever she was, she drove forward multiple projects and spaces — she was a curator and editor with TEOR/ética, and oversaw the 10th Central American Art Biennial and the 31st Pontevedra Biennial. She was also a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, a coordinator and curator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Exhibitions Department and the general coordinator of the Museo’s Public Activities.
Her texts resound with the rhythm of two of her preferred pleasures encompassing body and movement: swimming and dancing. From the members of the reading group Respirar (Breathe) and the affective circle of Tamaristas, and with Idoia Zabaleta as a guide and the presence of Élan d’Orphium, the attendees read dancing and dance reading words written across almost three decades. All of this is situated in the specific contexts and urgencies of Cuba, Central America and Spain, places where she lived and the artistic debates of which contributed from what she termed a “proximate critique”.
Through Díaz Bringas, writing is understood as being in the world which is highly attuned to listening and mutual understanding, imagining desirable futures where not creating alone is a political and daily act. This encounter and the book constitute a collective gesture of the many lives she touched to show an appreciation for her work and make it more visible.
The encounter is part of the special programme the Museo devotes to ARCOmadrid 2024 and its theme this year: The Shore, the Tide, the Current: an Oceanic Caribbean.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
ARCOmadrid
Participants
Aurora Carmenate Díaz holds a degree in Art History from the University of Havana, where she worked as a professor of Latin American Art for three years. She curated the Cuban contemporary art project El Apartamento (2017–2020) and associated shows from the 13th Havana Biennial. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art History from the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía, and some of her critical texts feature in the independent art and literature magazine Rialta.
consonni is an independent publisher with a cultural space in the San Francisco neighbourhood in Bilbao. It has produced cultural critique since 1996 and currently commits to the written word and also the whispered, heard, silenced, recited word, the word turned into action, into body. Written in lower case and constantly mutating, consonni is an androgynous, multi-headed creature, with feminisms and listening as superpowers, that looks to affect the world it inhabits and to be affected by it. Among other actions, it amplifies extraordinary voices in book form and creates contexts to read, dance, sing and discuss them collectively.
Élan d’Orphium (a.k.a. Pablo García Martínez) is an artist. His work sets forth re-readings of gender in a broad sense via a confabulating interpretation of listenings, gestures and observations with species from other kingdoms. He has participated in projects for Intermediae (Madrid, 2018), the programmes ¿Pero… esto es arte? (2019) and Picnic sessions in CA2M (Móstoles, 2023), Visual Arts Circuits from the Community of Madrid (Madrid, 2021), the Matadero Centres of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid, 2021), the National Classical Theatre Company (Madrid, 2022), Schwules Museum (Berlin, 2022) and the Injuve Youth Institute (Madrid, 2023).
'Respirar' is a space upheld by a group of workers from the Museo Reina Sofía and with the presence of other proximate people to share texts and be affected by them. It was set up in the early days of lockdown in 2020, under an initiative by the Museo’s Public Activities team, and was promoted by Tamara Díaz Bringas. After stopping for a time, the second phase of this space came from March to September 2023, in parallel with the gestation of the book Todas las vidas (All Lives).
'Tamaristas' is the colloquial name of a broad network of people united around Tamara Díaz Bringas and the practice of care. It is also the name of the WhatsApp group comprised of these people as a modest thread uniting them all.
Idoia Zabaleta is a choreographer and biologist. Since 2000, she has co-produced and created her own work, collaborating with other artists and researchers like Isabel de Naverán, Filipa Francisco, Antonio Tagliarini, Ixiar Rozas and Jaime Conde Salazar, among others. Her work has been on view at international festivals and encounters. In 2013, she created the work Leer y Bailar (Read and Dance), and, in 2022, presented the performance lecture of Lumbung stories with consonni at documenta fifteen. Since 2008, with Juan González, she has tended to and directed the AZALA space of artistic creation and residencies.
![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)
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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.
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L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
UP/ROOTING
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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.
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
23, 24, 25, 30, 31 OCT 2025
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“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros