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Thursday, 27 April 2023 Nouvel, Auditorium 200
Session 1
5pm Solidarities of Light and Darkness: Imagining Post-human Futures
Lecture
— by Alejandro Rivero VadilloRooted in environmental humanities, this conversation casts light on new ways of imagining the future of Homo sapiens in the Anthropocene. Be it through the techno-optimist prism of solarpunk or the “profound” nature of the eco-poetics of black metal, new imaginaries of the future have, in recent years, emerged which demonstrate that not only is there more than one unique horizon of possible climate scenarios, but also that these horizons do not have to become the apocalyptic territory and ecocide traditionally forewarned in twenty-first-century science fiction.
5:40pm Break
6pm Epiphyte. Plants, Seeds and New Imaginaries
Performance lecture
— by Side ThinkersA presentation of the project Epiphyte and its rationales, contextualising the activities that form the backbone of the programme. Adopting ecological thinking which fosters the well-being of the entire planet means to recognise the intimacy between human beings and the non-human, and accept their differences. A way of inhabiting or approaching those spaces of vulnerability is a poetic exercise, in addition to observing how this is entwined with territory, animality, the plant world and feminism. As writer and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams asserts: “I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb”.
6:20pm Pollinating (Con)tact. Bioinspiration and Politics and Poetics of the Future
Conservatoire
—Participants: Paco Calvo, Malú Cayetano, Elena Lavellés and Emilio Santiago Muiño
—Moderated by: Maria José ParejoThis conversation is guided by concepts explored in Epiphyte and those which run through the guest participants’ lines of research. Its starting point is the notion of future: Is it possible to imagine without a clear notion of future or does the imagination create it? How are our perception, language, desires and fears altered by a notion of the future riddled with crises — epistemological, climatic, economic, border crises, among others?
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Thursday, 27 April 2023 Meeting Point: Nouvel Building, Auditoriums, Lobby
Session 2
8pm Wetland Adrift
Sound Journey
— Conducted by Clara BreaA journey that moves through the Museo from the lobby of the Nouvel auditoriums to the Garden, setting forth a drifting listening exercise from an excerpt of Wetland, a sound piece composed and recorded in September 2019 in Delta del Ebro, one of the environments most at risk through climate change in the Iberian Peninsula. Through her work, Clara Brea draws inspiration from soundscapes and advocates the act of listening as a possible tool of reflection and change.
8:15pm Sorbito
Happening
— By Ainhoa Hernández EscuderoSorbito is a project in which stage language expands to a collective body, breaking every barrier between artist and audience and encouraging a collective experience through ingestion and the relational. It puts forward a collaboration with medicinal herbs as a form of exchange, imagining the encounter of human cellular membranes and the cell walls of plants. Sorbitos (sips) are small drinkable and aromatic samples, each one with a specific materiality and made with a herb with specific properties. The project sets out from the study of herbalism and pre-modern healing traditions, resituating these practices — historically associated with women’s knowledge — in contemporaneity.
What would happen if, as Sepideh Ardalani posits, we thought of the plant-human relationship not as unilateral but as an interaction between two agents that find one another to co-perform a process? And what if we consider that in the process of boiling, smelling and ingesting a herb its knowledge is also incorporated into us? How can we think about pre-modern healing practices from tools which give us contemporaneity?
Epiphyte. Pollinating (Con)tact
Bioinspiration and Politics and Poetics of the Future
Held on 27 abr 2023
Epiphyte is a project, nurtured by the cultural association Side Thinkers and directed by Vanesa Viloria, which investigates new forms of facing the eco-social crisis by observing the plant world as a way to learn of other ways of life, community and future. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Pollinating (Con)tact, a programme structured around two artistic proposals and two conversations with agents and professionals linked to environmental humanities, artistic creation, science and climate activism.
Starting from the hybridisation of languages and disciplines, this activity seeks to move beyond the hegemony of academic language as a medium to transmit knowledge, shining a light on other narratives such as fiction and poetry and focusing on the senses.
Bioinspiration and Politics and Poetics of the Future, the subtitle to the activity, foregrounds the pillars with which the activity is built. The first is bioinspiration, related to how, through listening and being mindful of our environment, we can open up new imaginaries and find antidotes to the stages of collapse. This is followed by politics and poetics of the future: two interwoven and co-dependent terms because, bearing in mind the new landscapes of future desolation, there is a need to invent new narratives that flow beyond their roles and move into gestures, actions and delicacy, using the words of poet and vet María Sánchez. In the political gesture, as in the poetic gesture, simplicity is perhaps the most complex articulation. The most powerful and challenging aspects when observing the future is the desire to break down the discourse of survival to reach a liveable life.
The order of the different activities that configure this programme are fastened together as an immersive passage, a fluctuation of “from outside to inside language” and vice versa. Thus, the approach entails playing with the very logics of the narrative, where the native territories of three acts — beginning, middle, end — are eroded to make way for oscillating temporalities with which to look at, from different perspectives, different notions and future possibilities that lie in wait.
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Clara Brea develops her work at the intersections of sound art, phonography and electronic music. Her interest in field recordings stems from the impulse to link her music practice to environmental and social issues, using the acoustic environment as a tool to transmit her concerns and affects with the world that surrounds us. She has participated at events such as CALMA, Eufònic and DC Listening Lounge, and has been artist-in-residence at Matadero Madrid.
Paco Calvo lectures in Logic and the Philosophy of Science and directs the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab) at the University of Murcia. His research interests broadly span cognitive science, particularly plant intelligence, ecological psychology and situated cognitive science. Moreover, he has collaborated with the Office of Naval Research in the USA, researching sources of plant inspiration for robotics and artificial intelligence.
Malú Cayetano is a landscape architect who works on different projects related to the social transformation of habitat, urban regeneration, ecological restoration and artistic and cultural production. She employs participatory methodologies and formulas to activate public commitment by making visible natural processes in urban contexts. Furthermore, her interests centre on debates around people’s position in relation to the biosphere and the capacity of artistic practices as mediators between citizens, ecology and territory.
Elena Lavellés is a visual artist, film-maker and researcher. Her theoretical research work and fieldwork explore correlations between social strata and geological layers. She has been part of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (New York) and has received different awards, grants and international residencies. Furthermore, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions at MeetFactory (Prague), CalArts (Los Angeles), Museo Alberto Mena Camaño (Quito), the Institute of Contemporary Arts of Singapore (Singapore), Centro Cultural de España en México and Matadero Madrid.
Raquel G. Ibáñez is an artist and curator with an interest in thresholds and/or liminal spaces, and sound as a form of writing or dismantling the word, and its confrontation with the visual image. She is the co-founder of the collective El Banquete and the music platform Possible Others, and is currently a resident at Matadero Madrid as a member of the study group Una fiesta salvaje. She has also developed projects for Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Azkuna Zentroa, La Casa Encendida, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), TEA Tenerife, Hangar and hablarenarte.
Ainhoa Hernández Escudero is a choreographer who is part of the Twins Experiment collective and the curatorial project Saliva. She has shown her work at Frascati Amsterdam, Come Together, Bâtard Festival in Brussels, La Casa Encendida, Gessnerallee Zürich, Museo del Chopo, Espai nyamnyam and La Caldera, and has received the 3Package Deal of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst Prize (AFK) in the Dance category, and the support of the International Choreographic Arts Centre (ICK), Fonds Podiumkunsten / Balkonscènes, CA2M, Injuve and Centro Coreográfico Canal.
Alejandro Rivero Vadillo studied Modern Languages, Translation and English Studies at the University of Alcalá, and is also a researcher at Instituto Franklin, part of the same university. Furthermore, he is assistant editor at the magazine Ecozon@, a member of Grupo de Investigación en Ecocrítica and the Laboratorio de Estudios del Futuro. His work approaches post-humanist philosophy and thought around ecology and technology reflected in literature, music and film.
Emilio Santiago Muiño holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and is a scientist in the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He also researches the anthropology of the climate crisis. From 2016 to 2019, he was technical director of the Environment at Móstoles Town Council. He has lectured at the Autonomous University of Madrid, the University of Zaragoza and on the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA, and currently co-directs, with Jaime Vindel, the research project Humanidades Energéticas (Energy Humanities).
Vanesa Viloria is a cultural manager and curator with an interest in urban commons, collective creation and self-representation and their power to dismantle hegemonic mechanisms. She has worked at Matadero Madrid and the COTEC Foundation for Innovation. She directed Side Thinkers since its founding, up until her recent role as a cultural policy advisor. Currently, her concerns are related to cultural ecology and the right to culture.
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Curators
Raquel G. Ibáñez and Vanesa Viloria
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies
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.