Held on 20 Oct 2020
I tear
the throat
they plunged
into my body
Lupe Gómez, Disobedience, 1995
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.
Revolving around themes on the capacity to speak and utter, the violence involved in speaking up, the use and questioning of one’s own voice or the voice of others, feigned or simulated, when it flutters in the undetermined limit between the consideration of truth or lie, this edition of ESTUDIO looks to imagine new forms of listening and recognition. It stops before the perception of voices and sounds — seemingly non-human, produced from a human body — yielding to the attempt to leave oneself — leave verb and language, break the asymmetry between form and content — to search for a mental, vital rhythm, an enduring and shared exhalation.
Over the course of an afternoon and evening, the research of four artists whose work is linked to voice will be presented, prompting an immersive journey through the limits where the word emerges, something half said or unsaid. Delving into a medium from the imperceptible howl of a brief spasm, a sound that coaxes and slows to become song, to become a wail, the physical stirring of phonemes, gestures akin to a sole animal, an over-linguistic effort, to live our relationships from uncertainty and vibration.
In a cumulus of intensities, the journey is set out inside three spaces in the Museo: one of the rooms of the Collection in the historical Sabatini Building, the former site of San Carlos Hospital, founded in the eighteenth century; the Garden; and the Protocol Room, in the contemporary Nouvel Building. The programme is concluded with a preliminary session in the form of conversations with the participating artists, bringing these essays closer to their areas of study.
PROGRAMME
Tuesday, 20 October 2020 / From 10am to 2pm
Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
ESTUDIO in conversation
An encounter that seeks to bring the public in touch with different performance proposals, before they take place, by approaching fields of research that explore the array of projects presented. Thus, it puts forward a common space of learning in the form of a colloquium with speakers associated with the artists participating in the second edition of ESTUDIO. Approached around four conversations, it opens up reflections, formulates questions and shares references to detect and reveal common interests, connections and potential. In short, a journey through the limits where the word emerges.
Thursday, 22 October 2020 / From 5pm to 9pm
Session 1 / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
The Breeze Carries Lies. Niño de Elche
Lenght: 40’
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The breeze carries lies,
And let he who says he doesn’t lie
Tell you he doesn’t breathe
(Spanish folk song)
Heavy flamenco song, long song, song that belongs to someone, stolen voice, afillá (hoarse) voice, the voice this way, a gruff squawk, voice in song, voice of argument, ideal voice, the flamenco song written with spelling mistakes, personal song? The monkey sings from memory, song by right, oral voice, one’s own voice? Imaginary voice or voice of the mad, noisy voice, voice painted, strip back the voice, irate voice, legitimate voice, spiritual voice, voice of yarn, bastard song, regulated song, gifted song, ghostly song, spectral voice, voice of rubbish or voice of truth, sing another tune, common voice? Song of fire, physical voice, bloodied voice, spatial voice, deliberated voice, reflective voice, song of boy or girl, speechless voice, singular voice? Sing with no mouth, truthfully lying voice.
Niño de Elche
There is a lie attributed to forms of art-making, practices from which, paradoxically, a kind of purity or authenticity is demanded. The voice, in its materiality, takes on a channelling of this complexity, showing the being that it is blurred, shaped by impurities, haziness. But maybe it is these textures — those that show the fumbles of speech and thought — that make a being alive and changeable. The Breeze Carries Lies is an experimentation which, as in all experimental processes, is in progress and attempts to speak to us of the voice or voices as body, space and hope. Denying the veracity of the voice is to broaden its conception and thus be able to displace us towards places that encourage us to continue observing the quantity of linguistic, sound, conceptual, spatial and communicative possibilities it offers. Here it is about understanding the lie not as harmful per se, but as something that can grant us the constant possibility of discovering new paths from which to rethink our new forms of social, cultural and political relations.
Session 2 / Sabatini Building, Room 102
Tutuguri. Flora Détraz
Length: 25’
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Produced at the crossroads between the vocal cords and physical movement of the body, in an exercise to “listen” how a dance sounds, Tutuguri is a polyphonic performance that takes its title from Tutuguri. The Rite of the Black Sun (1936), the well-known poem by Antonin Artaud.
Tutuguri explores the asynchronism between movements and sounds, in a perpetual conflict of opposites where the body of the person dancing is inhabited by whispers, animal grunts, child noises, strange sounds, conversations, song, and abdominal sounds that transport us to a spectral landscape of voices, sketching a state of connection between sound flows and affection.
Session 3 / Sabatini Building, Garden
Souffle(s)! [Delusions of (a) Garden]. Loreto Martínez Troncoso
Length: 35’
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Martínez Troncoso responds to the invitation to continue exploring the relationships between action and language, between orality and body gestures, with a proposal conceived for this edition of ESTUDIO, upon which she reflects with the following words:
(And the formulation of these words does not come easily, similar to having a lump in your throat).
I recall a few years back the silence that settled in my throat as I became open-mouthed1… silence from dryness? Today this silence settles through a closed mouth, a full mouth. In a closed mouth no air can get in and, on a du mal à respirer! The nares still remain. What would my nares say if they could speak?
(so much time for so few words to be formulated, although words are not that much because there are many words here inside, but the tension or attention of how one feels at the time… [delirium of a garden])
— …ma bouche est un creux, a garden, a hole, an inside and outside, an over- and underground, land or a den to clear, oxygenate, caress.
(I imagine this coming 22 October with wind, touching and caressing our skin...)
With souffle I entitle or call — perhaps it is a calling — this moment, which in Spanish means: breath, breathing, blowing, wind… and with the exclamation mark of its verb souffler: Blow! Breathe Out! Huff! Puff! Growl! Snort! Breathe! Breathe in! Take a breath! Push! Fly! Fly away!
1Avoir le souffle coupé, literal translation: to be short of breath.
Session 4 / Sabatini Building, Room 102
Speak to Me, Body. Nazario Díaz
Length: 50’
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I propose an act of resistance by tying aspects such as the phonetic transformation of my vocal flow, the notion of circularity or the idea of purging through perseverance, placing my body in collision with language and a certain will for geographical and identity oscillation.
Nazario Díaz
Speak to Me, Body is part of Looking for Pepe, a study that started in 2016 and sets out from the figure of Córdoba artist Pepe Espaliú (1955–1993), unfurling a series of investigations around the body, language and territory.
The work takes its title from the text Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote in conjunction with the exhibition held in Pabellón Mudéjar in Seville in homage to Espaliú in 1994, a year after his death from AIDS-related complications. The interest in how Espaliú developed links between his work and his circumstances, marked by illness, at a social and political period undergoing a major transformation, inspires a work linked to the subject matter that mutates or disappears, and the idea of the erosion and restraint of a body understood as physical and social existence.
Looking for Pepe opens out from the mutual involvement of Jorge Gallardo, Jesús Alcaide, Cuqui Jerez, María Jerez, Isaak Erdoiza and Ion Munduate; and Speak to Me, Body has gestated as research inside the framework of the 2016/2017 MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture and was premiered on 29 November 2018 in Elipsiak, a series curated by Isabel de Naverán for Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.
Force line
Rethinking the museum
Curator
Isabel de Naverán
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsorship
Admission:
Conversations: sold out
Performances: sold out
Punctuality is required given that entry will not be allowed once the first performance is under way. Doors open at 4:30pm
Duration:
Conversations: 4 hours
Performances: 3 hours and 45 minutes
Participants
Niño de Elche (Elche, 1985) is an “inter-disciplinary” artist whose broad-ranging work synthesises strands of genres such as flamenco, rock, contemporary music, freeform improvisation, electronic music, poetry, visual arts and performance. At this intersection of forms and language notably stands his project Vaconbacon, cantar las fuerzas (2011), drawing from the painter Francis Bacon, with the collective Bulos y Tanguerías, and his albums Voces del Extremo (voted best album of 2015 by music critics), Antología del Cante Flamenco Heterodoxo (2018), Colombiana (2019) and albums in collaboration with Toundra (Exquirla) and Los Planetas (Fuerza nueva). Also of note are his diverse performances at the Sónar Festival, with Los Voluble and Israel Galván, and collaborations with performing artists that include Angélica Liddell, Juan Carlos Lérida, Belén Maya and María Muñoz, to name but a few. Moreover, he has published two books, No comparto los postres (2016) and Morbo legítimo (2019), both published by Bandaàparte Editores. In 2019 he was awarded the Inédit Festival Prize for the best Spanish documentary with Niños somos todos (Inner Kids), and he is currently finishing his work based on research into the sonic legacy of Val del Omar with a sound installation entitled Invisible Auto Sacramental. A Sonic Representation from Val del Omar in the Museo Reina Sofía, and his latest record La distancia entre el barro y la electrónica. Siete diferencias valderomarianas, produced by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández.
Flora Détraz (Paris, 1988) is a choreographer and performer who initially trained in classical Ballet and Literature. She studied with Maguy Marin in the National Choreographic Centre of Lyon and completed her training with the Choreographic Study, Research and Creation Programme (PEPCC) at Forum Dança, Lisbon. As a choreographer and performer, she worked with Marlene Monteiro Freitas on the piece Bacantes-Prelude to a Purge (2019). Furthermore, she has worked or studied with artists such as Vera Mantero, Lia Rodrigues, Meredith Monk, Loïc Touzé, Meg Stuart and Jonathan Burrows, all of whom have had some influence on her way of working and her current concerns. Since 2013 she has developed her own research around the relationships between the voice and movement, culminating in pieces like Peuplements (2013), Tutuguri (2016) and Muyte Maker (2018). Her forthcoming creation, Glottis, will be presented in November 2020 at the lkantara Festival in Lisbon, and, subsequently at the December Dance Festival in Bruges.
Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, 1978) works primarily with writing as her subject matter, the word (the act of saying), its tempo, rhythm, (its) silence… taking on the form of publicly “speaking up”, sound pieces, written texts and also interventions in and with spaces. In addition to collaborations with different artists, her work has slowly but surely opened out to other voices, the voices of others, particularly with Opereta A~Mar (2014) Entre[hu]ecos (2017) and El eco de tu voz - l'écho de ta voix (2018). In recent years we have been able to experi-mention her “writings” in her exhibition in CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 2019); her exhalations and song in Chambre n°53, (soupervues, Vaison-la-Romaine, 2018); her sighs and éclats in “Mutaciones: Vidas secretas” (Museo Picasso, Buitrago del Lozoya, 2018); her words and non-words in Ah ha! (PAN! – Privé/Public, IF, Limoges, 2017) and Et la terre tourne, (Parades for FIAC, Paris, 2016); her respirations/expirations in Por dónde comenzar, si est-ce qu’il y a un commencement quelconque (Galería PM8, Vigo, 2017), and her silence in El aire que yo respiro es el aire que tú respiras (Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2016).
Nazario Díaz (Linares, Jaén, 1985) develops his work primarily in the field of performing arts, focusing on the concepts of the body, the gaze and writing. He is part of the collective Vértebro, with Juan Diego Calzada and Ángela López, with whom he curated the festival Beautiful Movers in Córdoba. His experience of the MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, ARTEA and the Museo Reina Sofía has lent him a critical context in which to develop his project Looking for Pepe, which brings together past interests around two main concepts: presence and resistance. As a performer he has worked with, among others, Jorge Gallardo, Isaak Erdoiza and Societat Doctor Alonso. Since the end of 2018, he has lived in Bilbao, where he participates in two collective contexts of learning: PICA, an intensive programme of support for a temporary community of artists and researchers, held in Azala (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and run by Idoia Zabaleta and Luciana Chieregati, and the programme Invitación, a proposal by Coletivo Qualquer to investigate and exchange methodologies and tools from the sphere of live arts. At the present time, he is working on Otro borrado a través de la insistencia, as a solo work, and Conversation pieces, with Basque choreographer Isaak Erdoiza.
Más actividades
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.
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.