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12 May, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Ciudad Escuela Presentation
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9 June, 2014 Sabatini Building, Children’s Workshops
Session 1. The right to an infrastructure
An open infrastructure is one with an open ‘code’ that other people can learn from, replicate and even contribute to improving. It is precisely this openness that prompts us to rethink street furniture: not only its uses and capacities, but also its potential, how to open it out and link it to other teams, other people, other spaces and other urban relationships. By opening the design of infrastructures that furnish the city, we are opening, therefore, the same conceptualisation of the major city: the uses its spaces may have, and what we want them to have, what we want to do with them; how we want to place ourselves in relation to the objects and technologies that populate the city, in terms of how it is governed and managed. The opening of infrastructures opens the conceptualisation, technical systems and ways of doing politics in the city. In this first session we will be taking a look at the ways the city is thought about today in critical urban studies: cyborg cities, metabolic systems, experimental urbanisms, ‘the right to the city’ and common urban uses. Within this context we will introduce the notion of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a new place from which to deal with urban transformations.
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11 June, 2014 Sabatini Building, Children’s workshops
Session 2. Research in motion
What does researching a city mean?. The study of social sciences has traditionally deployed methodological tools that make certain urban dynamics their 'object’ of study (space, gender, geographical inequalities). There is research 'about' the city and 'in' the city, yet what would happen if we researched 'with' the city?. What would happen if the city were no longer our object and became our research method?. Drifting and wandering are two paradigmatic examples of how urban practices revolve around a unique method of producing awareness. This second session looks to delve deeper into this exploration; therefore, our inspiration is drawn from exercises of material intervention in urban design, conceived as modes of experimental urbanism. We feel that the deployment of material infrastructures in the city generates environments that allow us to imagine and engage in a different city; thus, the aim is consider street furniture as an infrastructure that helps to reformulate methods of social research, to refurnish our ways of thinking and to explore what urbanising the methods of social research would mean.
Ciudad Escuela (City School). 15Muebles Workshop
Held on 09 jun 2014
Within the framework of the Museo Reina Sofía 2013-2014 residencies, the collective 15Muebles presents urban teaching based on an open code: Ciudad Escuela, a gateway and invitation to ways of discovering, learning about and making a city.
What does "making a city" mean today? Who and what make a city? And most importantly, what kind of learning is at stake? From urban allotments to self-managed sites, via citizens’ initiatives geared towards conserving heritage or promoting book exchanges, today, more than ever, the city is awash with flavours and learning that escape traditional tools and resources in teaching. With respect to the Playgrounds exhibition, with themes that include the reinvention of urban space, Ciudad Escuela takes on the challenge of making the emergence of the city as an educational setting, as an open classroom, visible. Based on Open Badges technology from the Mozilla Foundation, and devised to add value to unregulated learning in the Internet age, Ciudad Escuela tackles the design of open urban teaching. Thus, Ciudad Escuela transforms urban imagery and urban tools, practices, games and languages to work towards a common city, and, in short, to consider the city as a place of open teaching.
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Programa educativo desarrollado con el patrocinio de Fundación Banco SantanderParticipants
15Muebles is an infrastructure for collaborative work with Basurama, Zuloark, UrbanoHumano and the Prototyping project, and is one of the projects selected in the Museo Reina Sofía’s 2013-2014 research residencies programme.
![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)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.