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19 November – 17 December 2020 – 7pm / Online Platform
Audiosphere Audio Society
A Society of Shared Listening and Dialogue
Listening together and sharing that which is heard. This is the aim of the first edition of Audio Society, which gets under way with the exhibition Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980–2020 and, on this occasion, features the participation of five pre-eminent figures in the sphere of art, sound and aural culture: María Andueza, Alberto Bernal, José Luis Espejo, Marina Hervás and Susana Jiménez. Each one has devised a listening route based around works in the show, in addition to the proposal put forward by the exhibition’s creator — implemented in the listening device with which the standard visit is made.
The recommendations or alternative routes of our five “guides”, accompanied by concise explanatory notes to be read or listened to, can be following independently, accessing the available content below. Additionally, people who wish to do so can participate as listeners or share their experiences, concerns and comments in the so-called Sound Assemblies in our Audio Society. These will take place on consecutive Thursdays in the months of November and December, and will be accompanied and moderated by each of the five “mediators”.
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28 September 2020 – 11 January 2021
Concha Jerez. What Is Said and What Is Hushed
On the stairwells of the Sabatini Building echo unheard voices, forgotten names, spaces of ignominy. We cross the corridor in silence and travel through past words that have been, conscientiously, buried in endless scribbles.
From trap to trap, a form of divertimento put forward by the artist, we travel through different rooms: places of collective and individual memory, inhabited by images of denouncement, pain and personal experiences. A memory stolen from us, one that remains concealed yet, at the same time, is revealed unconsciously, between what is said and what is hushed.
Through this journey around the exhibition Concha Jerez. Our Memory Is Being Stolen, we approach the artist’s reflections on some of the events that form our recent history, as witnesses and protagonists in the dialogue between the artist and the historical building housing her work.
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11 November 2020 – 1 March 2021
Disonata. This Voice Starts to Exist Before You Hear it
As a bona-fide disonata, this journey offers multiple readings and possibilities: irony, sarcasm, nihilism; the poetic; pure sound; the objectual and the political. Not only views but also experiences can come to pass in the exhibition rooms, coordinated by people from the mediation team.
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2 December 2020 – 14 April 2021 – 5pm / (Check programme)
Everything Is Sound
Sound Tours for Teachers of Secondary Education
The Listening School, the Museo’s teacher-training project, sets forth a programme of sound tours around the exhibitions Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980–2020, Disonata. Art in Sound up to 1980, and Niño de Elche. Invisible Auto Sacramental: A Sonic Representation from Val del Omar. The aim is to build a space of collective listening and facilitate tools that develop into a new way of moving through the Museo with students.
These tours are structured in two parts: first, an independent tour or group tour with limited numbers around the aforementioned temporary exhibitions, following a set route made up of a series of pre-selected works. Second, an encounter in different spaces inside the Museo to share experiences, paying attention to the sounds heard and discovering how we resonate together.
Eardrum
A Project of Transversal Mediation Around Sound and Aural Culture
- Guided Tour
Held on 01 nov 2020
An eardrum is a membrane, an outer and inner limit. The eardrum vibrates to the world, transmitting its activity and vibrations towards the inner part of our body. This extremely thin but highly elastic and resistant tissue receives strikes carried by the air to let codes pass through in the form of nerve impulses that are recognisable to the brain. The eardrum is oblique and translucent. It is a microphone, a drum, a speaker. It grips a hammer that strikes an anvil that shakes a stirrup that moves a liquid that, in its movement, generates electricity which later… Later it’s all sound: shouts, whispers, explosions, words.
At the present time, a number of the Museo’s exhibitions converge — Disonata. Art in Sound up to 1980; Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980–2020; Concha Jerez. Our Memory Is Being Stolen; Niño de Elche. Invisible Auto Sacramental: A Sonic Representation from Val del Omar — placing sound (or sound art) at the centre. Different, at times opposing, approaches which reverberate around the Museo’s rooms simultaneously and trigger a conversion of our passive capacity to hear into active listening, reminding us, to paraphrase the artist Muntadas, that “perception requires participation”. Listening with the eardrum, yes, but also with our eyes, with our skin, by reading, by moving. Active listening, which is profound. Hearing by thinking.
With that in mind, the Museo’s Education Area sets in motion a series of actions, listening journeys, encounters and mediation projects to accompany and amplify these exhibitions, inviting participation for anyone interested in absorbing and reflecting on sounds to form a diverse group of hearers and listeners that can, at the same time, transmit back their experiences and impressions.
Sponsorship
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the Banco Santander Foundation
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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
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.
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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.