Held on 21 May, 04, 18 Jun, 02, 16 Jul 2021
The study group Embracing Uncertainty. Driving Away Evil II seeks to jointly reflect on the ways in which we understand health, healing and care in the current context of the COVID-19 crisis and encourages a pooling of experiences, emotions and knowledge. While the emergence of HIV coincided with the start of neoliberal globalisation in the late 1980s, the present crisis has not only transpired with the said system fully in place, but is also closely related to the consequences that this global project has produced on our way of life.
In these different sessions, questions are raised in relation to knowledge created from present-day experiences and how we politicise them: How are we living? What conditions does life produce? How do we manage the health/healing/care chain of people and otherness beyond humanity? How much attention do we pay to the relationship between different layers of existence: the environment, other living beings and things? How could health, understood as the well-being of life as a whole, be positioned at the centre of society without it meaning a more restrictive life experience?
A dialogue is set in motion from the present through experiences that were engendered in other decades with the so-called AIDS crisis, articulating questions around the management and politics of the body, in addition to the politicisation of the different aspects of these lived experiences.
Embracing Uncertainty. Driving Away Evil II stems from the process developed in 2020 with the study group Driving Away Evil, and is revitalised with a group of participants interested in the relationship between the pharmacologization of life and contemporary disturbances, as well as in imagining strategies of collective and daily resistance.
Programme
Embracing Uncertainty. Driving Away Evil II is organised across five sessions through ongoing and collective work, and pivots on four axes:
- Health as well-being and as a centre of human and non-human life/lives. How can we manage the health/healing/care chain of people and otherness?
- Ways of inhabiting the politics of affection and care. How can we understand the “fear of contact” that causes real and subjective barriers opposite “the other”, social fragmentation, and the construction of conflicted worlds? Is collective thinking around ways of being close possible?
- Language as a builder of realities. How can we inhabit new language born out of the pandemic and to what degree can these forms of naming, signalling and controlling reality be subverted?
- Stopping, Breathing, Doing Less. Can we stop? What does briefly stopping productivity, movement, commitments and consumption entail? Have we suspended or replaced them? Is there anything from this period we want to keep?
The first session centres on sharing the experience of the project Anarchivo sida (AIDS Anarchive) — developed by researchers coordinating this group, along with Aimar Arriola (Equipo re) — and of the study group Driving Away Evil, while the sessions that follow will include a review of past and present practices tied to HIV/AIDS movements, and the practices of the participants in this group. Moreover, collective tools will be fashioned from the axes, helping us to inhabit this uncertain time and a possible future. Artist Josune Urrutia will also participate to help conjointly build forms of realising a “narration”, as much through de-localised work as that which is generated in each session.
[dropdown]Nancy Garín and Linda Valdés are independent researchers who make up Equipo re, a research platform residing at the crossroads between politics of the body and archive and a platform which, in recent years, has developed the project Anarchivo sida (AIDS Anarchive). In 2020, they coordinated the study group Driving Away Evil in the Museo Reina Sofía, perpetuating exercises of reflection and debate around managing life.
Josune Urrutia holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and a Technical Degree in Illustration. As an artist, illustrator and draughtswoman, she works on processes and tools in which drawing is an essential medium for communication and socialisation, for instance graphic recording, graphic medicine in the world of healthcare and processes of collective drawing. She obtained a grant in graphic creation: comic and graphic novels, from the Basque Government in 2020, and earned an Honourable Mention in the Graphic Novel Residency at the Maison des Auteurs Angoulême, France, from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in 2018. She is the author of Compendio colectivo sobre cáncer (2020), Breve diccionario enciclopédico ilustrado de MI cáncer (2017) and Así me veo (2015), and will soon publish Hoy no es el día, a reflection on the social and political commitment to transforming relationships with cancer.
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Organiza
Museo Reina Sofía
Coordinan
Equipo re - Anarchivo sida (Nancy Garín y Linda Valdés)
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Fundación Banco SantanderParticipants
Participants
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This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
Dear Felix:
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Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
1926–2026: One Hundred Years of the Lyceum Club Femenino
Thursday, 2 July 2026
The Lyceum Club Femenino (Lyceum Women’s Club) was established in Madrid in 1926, constituting a space which opened new pathways for women to participate in Spain’s intellectual, artistic and political life in the first third of the twentieth century, and for figures such as designer Victorina Durán, pedagogue María de Maeztu, lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and artist Ángeles Santos, to name but a few. To mark the Madrid Club’s one hundredth anniversary, this research symposium examines its role as a key place for studying women’s and feminist culture in Spain’s Silver Age by analysing and vindicating the different agencies, trajectories and cultural projects that structured the space.
By way of three lectures and two round-table discussions, the symposium sets forth a journey through the Lyceum Club Femenino and the cultural context from which it emerged, from its standing as a pioneering institution to the study of cultural material from the period and the process of constructing the figure of the “modern woman”. These talks and discussions look to shed light on how new ways of thinking, creating and occupying public space were shaped, expanding the gaze on cultural, educational and social networks linked to the Lyceum — as much concerning its ties with other intellectual and artistic circles as the continuity and transformation of these networks during Republican exile. Finally, the symposium features three artistic interventions conceived to recover the artistic legacy of this space in Madrid.
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the Ministry of Culture’s cultural programme focused on the centenary of the Lyceum Club Femenino via these sessions, co-organised with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.