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Monday, 19 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium and online platform
Southern Europe on the Colonial Horizon of Western Modernity
— By Walter Mignolo
Online platformSpain’s position in the modern/colonial global order is unique and entails a discussion around multiple “souths” and “norths”. Although Spain was a key agent in the construction of colonial power in the sixteenth century, at the end of the eighteenth century it lost the pomp of modernity and was relegated to Southern Europe — the first transformation in the colonial pattern of power, subsequently managed by France, England and Germany. At that juncture, the invention of Southern Europe coincided, temporally and conceptually, with Orientalism. Mignolo looks to untangle the specific paradigm of Iberian and Spanish space in these constellations and what this mixed-race and Creole place, at once colonising and colonised, tells us about the colonial pattern of power.
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Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium and online platform
Traces of Violence. The German Empire in South-West Africa
— By Marcelo Brodsky
Online platformThe twentieth century’s first genocide was committed by the German empire between 1904 and 1908 in South-West Africa — Namibia today. This genocide targeted Nama and Herero ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples from the region, within a context of European powers dividing Africa at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). As in his previous works, Brodsky focuses on the way in which this crime against humanity is remembered and comprehended from specific research work and the recreation of photographic archives.
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Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini, Auditorium and online platform
Time and Friendship. A Conversation on Aníbal Quijano
— By Rita Segato and Walter Mignolo
Online platformA conversation on the life and thought of Aníbal Quijano, with whom both worked, and, more specifically, on his theory and practice of friendship. Quijano believed friendship holds a central place as a mode of doing in an intrinsic union between experience and thought. Setting out from this evocation, it is possible to examine other contemporary questions linked to the inheritance and validity of decolonial thought. In facing today’s geopolitical transformations, for instance the emergence of possible de-racialised capital as a result of China’s current economic dominance or before the climate crisis and global energy emergencies, there is a need to question the generativity of the emancipatory potential of Quijano’s decolonial project.
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Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
A Dream Is Life
— A performance by the Teatro Sin Papeles company
El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life) is a monologue by Thimbo Samb, produced by Teatro Sin Papeles and written and directed by Moisés Mato López. In the work, Samb touches on his migrant life path — dreams are life because they move feet and hands along the way and in tasks deemed necessary. The piece prompts us to read his experience in relation to La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), a baroque drama by Calderón de la Barca, thereby setting up a dialogue with the opposition and duality between free will and predestination, and between reality and dreams. Together with this performance, in conjunction with World Refugee Day (20 June), different awareness-raising activities against border violence will be held and implemented by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network) and the Museo Situado assembly, spotlighting the southern border (Ceuta and Melilla) where tragic events such those in Tarajal on 6 February 2014 and in Melilla on 24 June 2022 set in motion a campaign against neglecting justice and repair.
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Wednesday, 21 June 2023 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
Geography of Roots. An Epistemology of the Individual
— By Rita Segato
Online platformIn this lecture, Rita Segato proposes an understanding of roots as the last space of resistance before the commodification and privatisation of space and territory, characteristic of neoliberalism. If the anthropological base of community is its affective, imaginary, symbolic, aesthetic and sensitive connection to a specific space and irreplaceable in its uniqueness, then the denomination of these links makes territory sacred and constitutes powerful and invisible lines of resistance to capital’s needs. Opposite the imperial logics of urban planning and rural colonisation, based on the de-characterisation and continuous mobilisation of spaces, and before the major migratory and ecological crises that are commonplace in the current context, Segato defends the geographies of the soul of Indigenous peoples, their micro-toponomy and non-replicability, as a trench and a bridge with the past which survives in community.
![Primer mapamundi chino al estilo europeo. Matteo Ricci, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (坤輿萬國全圖) [Un mapa de la miríada de países del mundo], 1602](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/catedra-anibal-quijano-snippet.png.webp)
Held on 19 Jun 2023
The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges.
This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience. In his world of situated friendship, with the specific Andean spatial temporality, he represents a unique way of being in the world, giving rise to modes and powers of decolonial thought. Eager to avoid dissociating human experience and politics, the edition looks to reflect on the relationship between people, spaces and affects as a place of critical formulation and resistance inside the current ecological and geopolitical context, and from encounters and stage practices which centre bodies and territories.
The programme gets under way with a lecture by Walter Mignolo — one of the great decolonial thinkers, and a friend and successor of Quijano’s thought — with respect to the myriad dimensions of coloniality within the context of Spain. It continues with an encounter with photographer Marcelo Brodsky on the twentieth century’s forgotten holocausts and the relationship between the image and the idea of south, and a conversation between Mignolo and Rita Segato in relation to the validity of Quijano’s thinking in the present day. Furthermore, in conjunction with World Refugee Day, the Teatro Sin Papeles company presents the performance El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life). The Chair concludes with another master lecture, this time delivered by Segato as she discusses her latest research project concerning roots and their consequences.
Curator
Rita Segato
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Museo Situado
Programme
Inside the framework of
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Marcelo Brodsky is an artist and human rights activist who lives and works in Buenos Aires. After the 1976 coup d’état in Argentina, Brodsky sought exile in Barcelona, where he studied Economy at the University of Barcelona and Photography in the International Centre of Photography, and was taught by Catalan photographer Manel Esclusa. Situated at the limit between installation, performance, photography, monument and memorials, his works combine text and image and are part of the collections of, among other centres, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina and, recently, the Museo Reina Sofía.
Walter Mignolo is a semiotician and professor of Literature at Duke University. He worked alongside Aníbal Quijano and is one of the main successors of his thought. Over the past thirty years, he has devoted his research and work as a teacher to explaining and unmasking the historical pillars of what he defines as “modernity/coloniality”. In The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options (1995), he argues that coloniality has been constitutive and not derivative of modernity since its birth in 1500. Further, given that this cycle of coloniality is reaching its end, he focuses debate on the “postcolonial condition” with The Idea of Latin America (2005).
Teatro Sin Papeles is a company which was created in 2018, welcoming actresses and actors with migrant backgrounds to share their lives through theatre. Since it was founded, the company has activated different performances in cultural spaces linked to its surrounding reality, such as Teatro del Barrio (Lavapiés, Madrid) and Ateneu del Raval (Barcelona). Thimbo Sam is an actor and activist who reached Spain in a dugout canoe at sixteen years of age and faced a difficult life overcoming obstacles to reach one goal: to make his dream of becoming an actor a reality. He has participated in short films, documentaries, films and series.
Rita Segato is a professor of Anthropology and Bioethics in the UNESCO Chair at the University of Brasilia (Brazil). She was an expert witness on the trials of the Sepur Zarco case in Guatemala, where sexual violence was first tried and prosecuted, in the form of domestic and sexual slavery, as a war strategy used by the State. Her main fields of interest include new forms of violence against women and the contemporary consequences of the coloniality of power. Among her most important works are La Nación y sus Otros: raza, etnicidad y diversidad religiosa en tiempos de políticas de la identidad (Prometeo Libros, 2007) and La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos y una antropología por demanda (Prometeo Libros, 2013). She has directed the Aníbal Quijano Chair on decolonial thought in the Museo Reina Sofía since 2015.
Más actividades
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.
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.
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.