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Thursday, 18 November 2021 Edificio Sabatini, Escaleras de Sala de Bóvedas
Ará. Oracione to Open. Ángela Segovia
TicketsArá. Oracione to Open is a theatre piece conceived to be heard in darkness. It stems from a writing process which was initially tied to a physical action: the construction of a cabin in the forest of Las Navas del Marqués, in Ávila. The location of the cabin had to be the same as a past cabin, one which, as a young girl, Ángela Segovia had made with her grandfather. She wanted to work in a rural environment through an idea of repetition (going to the same place every day and discovering it) to purge writing from clichés and nostalgia. Yet, in her first visit to the place, she found that the space had become a cemetery of rock roses; she describes it as “that point at which for me a meditation began on death and a spiritual work that would lead down a path I call la Bella Morte”.
Over the course of a year, the poet developed the interweaving described between the manual construction of the cabin — using nearby sticks, dry branches, grasses, pigments and rocks — and the trial of a language that enables that place to be written.
Ará. Oracione to Open can be understood as an access route to the work the poet has developed since 2019 under the common title of la Bella Morte, accompanied and published in different stages by the publishing house La uña rota, Madrid.
Sound: Julián Segovia Soriano
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Thursday, 18 November 2021
Sabatini Building, Garden
Bird Call in the Garden. María Jerez and Élan d’Orphium
TicketsStarting from the fact that no presence is neutral and understanding that birds are also our contemporaries — beings with whom we share territories, events and history — María Jerez is interested in developing a relationship between her artistic practice and the said contemporaries, whose song, flight, choreography, nests and installations can interfere in her work, and vice versa.
In this instance, Jerez is joined in a collaboration with Élan d’Orphium, and together they occupy the Museo Garden at dusk to unfurl a shared situation of opening and attentive listening, a kind of invocation in the form of an experimental concert through bird call. A bird call is the sound birds use to call another from their species, or an imitation of this sound by a device, be it air instruments or horns.
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Thursday, 18 November 2021
Sabatini Building, Room 102
Andromeda Tunnel. Elena Aitzkoa
TicketsVoice as a light guide, resonating in matter. Song as a place of recognition and transformation. Dance as a gauge of air density. Lightness as a possible shortcut. Body to body in sculpture. All of us in movement. Nothing behind the ear. Head torch traversing Lendia Tunnel. A galaxy comes. New lichen nests on the rocks of the lake while dreaming. Once more, a new day awakens.
Elena Aitzkoa
Close to Apodaka, in the area of Álava, there is a pool of frozen water. Every year, at the end of August, the water level drops, making way for a cave at the end of the pool. The entrance is a narrow horizontal gap which grants access to a larger, darker hollow space. In August 2019, Elena Aitzkoa, with two friends, entered the cave people call Lendia. Inside, it changes from pool to lake. The sounds of the voice are different there, perhaps due to the resonance of the subterranean lake, the black-water ground. The intimate exploration of this underground place feeds into a reiterated encounter which seeks to reveal her journey.
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Friday, 19 November 2021
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
ESTUDIO III in Conversation
TicketsThis activity sets out to bring the public closer to different performance proposals by an approach to fields of research which explore different projects. Consequently, it puts forward a common learning space in the form of a talk with speakers associated with the artists participating in this third edition. Set up around three conversations, the encounter prompts reflection, the formulation of questions and a sharing of references or detecting and divulging common interests, connections and potential.
Held on 18 Nov 2021
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the third edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats 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.
Under the title Go Out to Encounter. Speak to Place this edition rests its gaze on the forms of situated ecology present in artistic processes, those which open up unforeseen possibilities of relations with the environment in closest proximity. Stemming from the exercise of poetry, writing, sculpture and performances, the different experimentations that materialise in this edition come together in a concern with decentring human beings and enquiring about other ways of being in — and communicating with — places, things, animals and phenomena.
Speak to Place, or rather speak with place, requires a will for displacement. It entails taking on that which is unknown in a certain language, a certain tongue. Letting the grasped and apprehended language brush against other languages, figuratively, literally, carnally. It means settling into a vicarious rhythm to seek common breathing. More than saying something, it means to go out in search of a connection, to open sensorial and perceptive channels that work as connective fabrics. Readying for the encounter of “oddkin” — to use Donna Haraway’s term — and considering the kinship of human beings with other not necessarily human species which inhabit the planet to, henceforth, “imagine other possibilities of living-with or dying-with in a world that is wounded but not finished”.
Go Out to Encounter is also to put the body and posture, the ways of being and doing, with others, whether it be things, plants, animals, rocks or rivers. In short, Go Out to Encounter is to acknowledge an enigma; it is in that place of possibility where this activity is situated, gathering the research of four guest artists who, through their art-making, explore modes of untested co-presence. From poetry, choreography and sculpture they lay out an encounter, go out to acknowledge a strange relationship which does not respond to a route made, but rather glimpses a sensitive rearrangement of landscape.
Following the dynamic of previous editions, ESTUDIO III puts forward a journey over the course of an afternoon and is articulated in three performances which take place in three spaces inside the historical Sabatini Building, the former site of the San Carlos Hospital founded in the 18th century: the access stairs to the underground Vaults Room, the Garden, and one of the rooms of the Collection. The programme is completed with Estudio III in Conversation, an encounter with the participating artists.
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Elena Aitzkoa is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, poetry, performance and film. Her creations are a heterogenous ecosystem which draws from physical and emotional elements of the environment and life experience. She also shines a light on and puts creative energy into the poetic configuration of matter and beauty as a link between beings. Her most recent projects most notably include the performance series Headscarfs Close to the Ground, inside the framework of OSLO PILOT (2016); the film Nuestro amor nació en la Edad Media (2018); the vinyl record of poems and whistles Paraíso terrenal (2019); and the exhibitions Zarza Corazón en el Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid (2019), Terraplén, in the Rosa Santos gallery in Madrid (2021), and Lendia Song in Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao (2021).
Élan d'Orphium (a.k.a. Pablo García Martínez). His work puts forward re-readings of gender, human beings and human gender via a collisional interpretation of listening, gestures and observations with species from other kingdoms. Élan d’Orphium’s work encompasses drawing, performance, action and the consequence of an act of being, sometimes hyperbolic, in which the image breaks from the structure and raises a territory of suspicion, non-narration and estrangement. He looks to dilute or integrate performance into the social and the social into performance in an exercise in relation to the symbolic potential of art.
Erea Fernández (Lugo, 1985) is a researcher of contemporary poetics, and a writer and teacher. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid, combining her work in the cultural sphere with teaching in secondary schools. Her concerns revolve around cultural objects aligned towards the materiality of language and how they problematise the logic of representation. She is the author of the book Poética del fragmento. Aproximación a la experiencia del sentido en in La Vie mode d’emploi by Georges Perec (Ediciones Complutense, 2012), and has published texts in academic, cultural and literary journals, collective books and art catalogues. Furthermore, since 2012 she has been a member of the seminar Euraca, a research project on present-day tongues and languages in the city of Madrid, and is also part of Boya, a collective of artistic and theoretical research active since 2021.
Soledad Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Torrelavega, 1976) is head curator of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and in charge of content for the platform st_age, linked to the same institution. She has spent the past twenty years working in the culture sector in different institutions in Spain and internationally, for instance Museo Guggenheim, in Bilbao, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. More recently, she has been director of CentroCentro in Madrid, where she worked on a programme based on contemporary artistic practice and collective learning. Her research pivots around the immaterial and transformative potential of art through performance and collective processes.
María Jerez is an artist whose work is situated between choreography, film and the visual arts. Her recent works question theatre and film conventions and the spectator’s implicit understanding of them, opening potential spaces through encounters with that which the spectator finds strange and alien and establishing blurred edges between that which is known and unknown, between object and subject, the animate and the inanimate. Her work seeks to escape logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge becomes something vulnerable before other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
Paula Pérez-Rodríguez (Madrid, 1989) is a cultural critic, researcher, editor and verbal artist. A companion of art-making in tacoderaya, a companion of thought in the seminar Euraca, and a companion of thought-art-making in the Boya collective, her research work combines approaches to cultural studies, performance and sound with focal points taken from literary theory, sociolinguistics and glotopolitics. She has written essays and articles in specialist publications, for instance 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada, from the University of Salamanca, the magazines Concreta and Kamchatka,and on digital platforms such as BeatBurguer, as well as collective works and art catalogues. With tacoderaya, a collective of a selection of voices and sounds formed alongside Jonás de Murias, she has carried out performances and played sets in institutions like Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, Matadero Madrid and L’Internationale Online.
Alejandra Pombo Suárez (Santiago de Compostela, 1979) holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, broadening her studies with the MA in Digital Arts from Pompeu Fabra University and the Independent Studies Programme (PEI) from Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Moreover, she holds a PhD in Fine Arts with her thesis on the paradoxes and effects of introducing the notion of performance in art, her art work moving through different mediums and characterised by the search for a new emotional narrative tied to what she calls “perencounter”, which focuses on relations and complexities. She has also participated in projects such as What is Third, in the Casa Encendida (2015) and Mugatxoanin LABoral, Fundação de Serralves and Arteleku (2004–2009), and has undertaken residencies in Spanish and international institutions like the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida, USA) and PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), among others.
Ángela Segovia is a poet and researcher. Between 2014 and 2016, she was a creative intern at Madrid’s City Council in the Student Residency. In 2019, she was awarded a grant from the Villalar Foundation with the project Apariciones de una cabaña en el bosque. She has also published the books ¿Te duele? (V Félix Grande Youth Poetry Award, 2009); de paso a la ya tan (Ártese quien pueda, 2013); La curva se volvió barricada (La uña rota, 2016), which won the National Literature Award, in the Miguel Hernández Youth Poetry category in 2017; Amor divino (La uña rota, 2018); Pusieron debajo de mi mare un magüey (La uña rota, 2020) and Mi paese salvaje (La uña rota, 2021). Furthermore, she has translated the book CO CO CO U, by Luz Pichel (La uña rota, 2017).
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Curator
Isabel de Naverán (ARTEA)
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
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
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?
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call “aestheticide” — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?
This three-hour seminar engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.
TEJA 2026. Open Call for Emergency Art Residencies
Proposal submission until 12 January, 2026
TEJA / Red de espacios culturales en apoyo a situaciones de emergencia [Network of Cultural Spaces in Support of Emergency Situations] has the mission to promote transnational cooperation by offering temporary art residencies to artists and cultural practitioners who find themselves in complex socio-political situations in their countries of origin. During their stay in Spain, residents receive accommodation, legal and psychological counseling, and access to a network of organizations and professionals with whom they can share, develop, and continue with their creative projects. The goal is to provide a safe and stimulating environment where artists can continue their work despite adverse circumstances and generate dialogue spaces that ensure freedom of expression through joint activities both in Spain and with international collaborators.
During 2026, TEJA hosts three new residencies, each lasting three months, dedicated to supporting artists and cultural practitioners residing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, in the second half of the year, TEJA hosts three additional residencies for Gazan artists, which are offered by invitation (as Spain is currently unable to facilitate evacuations from Gaza, these invitations are coordinated through France). These residencies aim to provide a stable, creative environment and foster artistic exchange in the face of ongoing adversities. Through this new program, TEJA reaffirms its commitment to amplifying Palestinian voices and empowering artists as they navigate these turbulent times.
The selection is carried out by the TEJA network in close collaboration with each hosting partner. This year the hosting partners are: La Escocesa (Barcelona), hablarenarte / Planta Alta (Madrid), Espositivo (Madrid), Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), Casa Árabe (Córdoba). The selection prioritizes the artist’s personal and professional situation first, and then the alignment with the practices and themes of the hosting spaces. Proposal submission deadline is January 12th, 2026, 23:59 h.