The Caribbean Relation
A Programme inside the Framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean
Ernesto Bautista, New promises, 2012
Date and time
Held on 07 Mar 2024
In The Caribbean Relation, the Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant. Moreover, the history of the Caribbean has demonstrated its capacity to transform the violence of colonisation into an amalgam of different influences and identities projected into the world via Caribbean diaspora.
By starting out from this subject, the Museo recovers the historical figure of experimental Puerto Rican film-maker José Rodríguez Soltero, reads and dances the writings of Cuban curator Tamara Díaz Bringas, and brings proceedings to a conclusion with a party/concert propelled by DJ Valerie Brathwaite, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and lives in Venezuela, and Toccororo, a Spanish woman with Cuban roots. In unison, it will re-open Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?, rooms in the Museo Reins Sofía Collection centred on post-colonial art and thought, to offer a wide-ranging exhibition programme with shows on Ulla von Brandenburg, Ibon Aranberri, Antoni Tàpies and Olga de Soto.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Activities
-
From 7 to 23 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
The Films of José Rodríguez Soltero: Cuir/Queer Latinx
Film Series
TicketsThe Museo recovers through this film series the work of Puerto Rican artist José Rodríguez Soltero (1943–2009), a key figure of Caribbean diaspora and the New York underground in the 1960s and 1970s. Rodríguez Soltero belonged to the same generation and social context as Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, sharing film-making methods, with the relevance of his work obscured until the restoration of his only three conserved films Jerovi (1965), Lupe (1966) and Dialogue with Che (1968), all three of which are screened in this series.
-
Saturday, 9 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400 and online platform
All Lives
Reading and Dancing the Texts of Tamara Díaz Bringas
Online platformThis 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. Through Díaz Bringas, writing is understood as a way of looking after ourselves, to be in the world through listening and mutual understanding. The texts gathered in Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024] are the pretext for celebrating, in this encounter, forms of making and the networks that the curator wove in her life, situated, across almost three decades, in the specific contexts and urgencies of Cuba, Central America and Spain.
-
Saturday, 9 March 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 1
The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean
ARCOmadrid 2024 Party in the Museo Reina Sofía
The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Caribbean tides and currents, which flow through the Sabatini Building’s Garden and Cloister from 10pm until midnight as part of the ARCOmadrid 2024 closing party. Embracing the themes of this edition of the Madrid art fair, The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, DJ Valerie Brathwaite and Toccororo unfurl a sound-based connection between distant shores, and with influences and approaches that are as interesting as they are different.
Collectionn
-
Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?
The Museo re-opens the rooms of the Collection centred on the 1990s, a period in which many of the changes that explain the current world order took place. In Spain, the events and celebrations of 1992 (Expo ‘92 in Seville, the Barcelona Olympic Games, Madrid as European Capital of Culture), six years after joining the European Union — in what was considered an example of a successful integration into modernity — reflected enthusiasm that concealed the weakness of an economic structure partly underpinned by a real estate bubble; its blowout in 2008 marked the beginning of the end of globalising euphoria.
Expo ‘92 in Seville was an event conceived to celebrate Spain’s categorical arrival into modernity and served to elucidate the light and darkness of Iberian colonial legacy, as well as enabling an analysis of the inherent relationship that exists between conquest and violence. Violence defined by extractivism, by the plundering of history and by the logics of colonialist dispossession, including the exploitation of resources and people, and conflicts of gender and race.
Exhibitions
-
Until 10 March 2024 Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez
Ulla von Brandenburg
One-sequence Spaces
The work of artist Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974) is shaped by her early training as a stage designer and a brief stint in the world of theatre. For this exhibition the artist develops a series of textile installations which, as backdrops, can be crossed by openings, thereby blurring the limits between inside and outside. The textile geometric forms are shown alongside three films by the artist to accompany the visual work, expanding information, providing nuances and inviting the spectator to move through this new scenography of entwined spaces and histories.
-
Until 11 March 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Ibon Aranberri
Partial View
TicketsThis anthological exhibition devoted to Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, 1969) assembles a selection of works spanning from the 1990s to the present, revisiting different projects and placing the stress primarily on the evolution of the artistic language he has employed across his career. Aranberri’s body of work is characterised by its incompleteness, and by generating materials and situations of different types which expand the artistic process. His practice encompasses the co-existence of documentary materials resulting from research processes with a corpus of images and sculptural forms which, seemingly veiled or inaccessible, establish a correlation between their abstract quality and the narrative materiality of documents.
-
Until 24 June 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 4
Antoni Tàpies
The Practice of Art
TicketsTo mark the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies have organised one of the most complete exhibitions on the artist to date, spanning over 220 works from museums and private collections from around the world to shine a light on his career arc from 1943 to 2012. Through the selected works, some of which have not been shown together for many years, this exhibition foregrounds the prolific career of Tàpies, resituating his work and influences in recent art history.
-
Until 1 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Space 1
Olga de Soto
Reconstruction of a Danse Macabre
TicketsInside the framework of the Fissures programme, choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972) revisits and expands upon a research project undertaken over more than a decade ago on Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and one of the foundational works in the history of contemporary dance. With the project, De Soto endeavours to explore the lasting impact on audiences who have seen Der grüne Tisch and on the dancers who have performed it, with the aim of generating an archive of testimonies stretching across sixty-seven hours and comprising four languages, six countries and two continents. In conjunction with the opening, an encounter is scheduled for Tuesday, 27 February between the artist and the show’s curator, Lola Hinojosa, under the title Behind The Green Table of Kurt Jooss.
Radio RRS
-
Podcast
Alexandra T. Vázquez
Migration and Sound
Listen to podcastAlexandra T. Vázquez (Miami, 1976) is a researcher, writer and associate professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work, framed within so-called performance studies, is centred on music, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, and Latin American and US Latina studies. This podcast contains her testimony following a conversation on her two books published to date: Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022).
-
Podcast
‘92 Ends it All
Putting Out the Fuses
Listen to podcastComposed as a sound collage, this podcast, produced in 2022, includes a voice mixed with different songs and sound resources, resulting from a research project which began two years previously and echoes the events held in 1992 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Spain’s colonial legacy. Therefore, this podcast is made in relation to the rooms of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection under the title Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?
Más actividades
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026 - Registration deadline extended
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?