Held on 20 dic 2022
The helplessness experienced in the death of thousands of people during the recent global pandemic, in addition to successive and current wars, exists alongside a growing sadness over environmental collapse and the destruction of life on Earth. In this context of social disturbance, forms of rituality and collective care arise, inviting us to reflect on the power of mourning to reshape relationships with the world.
In contemporary Western societies there is the prevailing conception of mourning as the process an individual must go through after the loss of affective ties to those who have passed. This acceptance, imposed as work based on the exercise of forgetting, is revised by Vinciane Despret in her book Our Grateful Dead. Stories of Those Left Behind (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). In it, Despret gathers the testimonies of lived experiences during mourning, and suggests we listen and tend to other forms of existence in our relationships with those who are no longer here. Gestures, behaviours and unusual attentions that can lead to mourning not being conceived negatively as an anomaly that we must cure ourselves of, but as a state which is able to perceive and house modes of uncommon co-existence between people, times, spaces and beings.
Drawing inspiration from these ideas, the programme starts by setting forth a critical questioning of the conception of mourning as individual experience, addressing the collectiveness of life and the conditions and categorisation of the sick body. It prompts a study of present issues in situated ecologies — for instance analogies between ways of life — so as to observe the tensions or conflicts that stem from them. The question around whether it is possible, as a society, to imagine and put into practice gestures that nurture a more just co-existence between humans and other species — animals, plants and minerals — and which also dissociate themselves from the established relations of consumption, destruction or domination, form the backbone of the overall intention of Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning.
The Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning Study Group is articulated around six sessions grouped into two blocks, whereby artists and researchers who work in different fields of knowledge — Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Marwa Arsanios, Rebecca Collins, María García Ruiz, Germán Labrador, José Antonio Sánchez, Alejandro Simón and Leire Vergara — are invited to share their investigations, readings, experiences and artworks, with the aim of cultivating a terrain of reflection and debate around mourning. It also follows on from the study groups previously coordinated by the research group Artea — Body, Territory and Conflict (2020–2021) and Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities (2022) — and is linked to the research project The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices of Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene, directed by Fernando Quesada, from the University of Alcalá de Henares, and funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
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Alejandro Alonso Díaz is a curator and writer whose practice explores the metabolic encounters between the natural, social and poetic structures of knowledge. He explores intimate epistemologies traversed by ecology, love and resilience, often based on investigations into other possible forms of existence and radical otherness. He recently co-edited the book Microbiopolitics of Milk (Sternberg Press, 2022), and is the director of fluent, an organisation devoted to contemporary art in Santander.
Marwa Arsanios is an artist, film-maker and researcher. Through her work she reconsiders the political ideology of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing more specifically on the relations between gender, urbanism and industrialisation. She approaches research from collaboration and a cross-over of disciplines, and has exhibited her work in spaces that include The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). She is the co-founder of the 98Weeks Reserch/Project Space.
Rebecca Collins is an artist and researcher. Her main research interests encompass listening, performing arts, sound studies and creative and critical writing. Since 2017, she has been a lecturer of Contemporary Art Theory at The University of Edinburgh. Collins’s work explores how critical, fictitious and performative interventions can cultivate attention towards our contemporary condition. She is currently a resident at the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT/UAM/CSIC).
María García Ruiz is a visual artist and researcher who holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Granada and is studying her PhD in Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She carries out her investigations around the production, physical and imagined, of territory through the articulation of hybrid narratives between image, writing and action. She currently develops her artistic practice as a resident in Hangar (2022–2024).
German Labrador is a researcher and has been director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department since 2021.
José Antonio Sánchez is a lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Cuenca and is a founder of the research group ARTEA and the MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture, organised by UCLM and the Museo Reina Sofía. His recent publications include Cuerpos ajenos (2017) and Tenéis la palabra. Apuntes sobre teatralidad y justicia (2022), and he has coordinated different events of thought and creation, for instance Situaciones (1999-2002), Jerusalem Show (2011) and No hay más poesía que la acción (2013).
Alejandro Simón is an artist, researcher and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca. He wrote his doctoral thesis Recordar las facultades del arte. Bellas Artes y Universidad en Madrid 1967-1992 (Recalling the Faculties of Art. Fine Arts and University in Madrid, 1967–1992) in 2019 at the Complutense University of Madrid. Furthermore, he curated the exhibition Essays on Seediness. Readings of the Miguel Benlloch Archive, with Mar Villaespesa and Joaquín Vázquez, at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM).
Leire Vergara is a curator who holds a PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a member of Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao. She has curated numerous series and exhibitions in institutions that include the Academia de España en Roma (2021), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2017) and Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (2016). Furthermore, she has been head curator at Sala Rekalde and a coordinator, with Peio Aguirre, of the DAE-Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak cultural association.
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Tuesday, 20 December 2022 – 5pm
The Tides Are the Artists. The Forms and Memory of the Nunca Máis Movement
—Conducted by Germán Labrador
Wednesday, 21 December 2022 – 5pm
By Autonomy We Understand Dependency on the Wind, Nutrients from the Earth, the Action of the Sun, and Rain during Winter and Spring
—Conducted by Alejandro Simón
Thursday, 22 December 2022 – 5pm
The Road to Tsukuba (Autoimmune Landscapes)
—Conducted by María García Ruiz
Tuesday, 24 January 2023 – 5pm
Detectives of the Invisible: Towards Cosmological Listening or How to Hear Evasive Particles
—Conducted by Rebecca Collins
Wednesday, 25 January 2023 – 5pm
Who is Afraid of Ideology?
—Conducted by Marwa Arsanios, José Antonio Sánchez and Leire Vergara
Thursday, 26 January 2023 – 5pm
An Energy that Comes Apart
—Conducted by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
Coordinated by
Isabel de Naverán (ARTEA)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
Material adicional
Participants
Participants
![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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.