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
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
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.
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.
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.