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.
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A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.