Held on 20 Dec 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
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.
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.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.