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Thursday, 13 October 2022 Sabatini Building, Room 102
Doble muda. Alejandra Pombo Su
TicketsAnimal presence is not theatrical; animals do not build an external image of themselves in relation to their appearance. Their behaviour is not based on trying to be something. Rather, their presence is full at all times. It is about being a situation and a place. The artist explores this animal presence with the voice, in vibration and transformation, as a body that sheds its skin towards an open and undefined space.
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Thursday, 13 October 2022 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
duet. Kike García and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca
Ticketsduet is the search for different compositional, matter and movement-based relations via the dialogue between a violin, a shawl, a musician and a dancer. The qualities of each element are explored, from listening and touch, from passiveness with agency and enjoyment, from doing, undoing, re-making. The possibilities of dancing and touching become infinite and invite semantic liberation.
It is the weight, the volume, the caress, the acoustics, the “infamous” form that creates movement. The shawl also dances, moves, holds the person wrapped in it and adapts to new forms of being together. In conversation, the violin develops into a surface from which to resignify touch as tact: rubbing, brushing, vibrating and making the instrument’s wood emerge, the horse hair, the metal, air and strings, the meteoric relationship with the shawl.
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Thursday, 13 October 2022 Sabatini Building, Room 102
Envioletá / un estudio. Javiera de la Fuente
TicketsHere the body is constructed, or, in addition to the body I carry — almost naked yet full of information — wishes to be emptied and filled again. It occurs once more in the encounter with flamenco, with a kind of skin I inherit but also choose, which questions and welcomes me.
Javiera de la Fuente
There was a time in the early musical career of Violeta Parra when, encouraged by her brother and guide Nicanor, she focused on Spanish genre music in the 1940s, ultimately winning a Spanish dance and song contest with the famed copla entitled La zarzamora. That little-known anecdote would give rise to Envioletá, a hybrid project lying between personal research on that universal artist, critical thought, flamenco, song, tradition and experimentation. More than an artwork, Envioletá is, above all, a series of physical and relational states, a mode of art-making and being. She presents here Envioletá / un estudio, a capsule that seeks to stir, move, slide, fade, touch and be touched by the tactile and the textile, singing and dancing this hidden part of the poetic, sound and performative legacy of Violeta Parra and also La zarzamora which mirrors flamenco culture.
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Friday, 14 October 2022 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
ESTUDIO IV in Conversation
TicketsThis activity looks to bring the audience closer to the different performance pieces by approaching research fields which explore the different projects. Thus, it constitutes a common learning space in the form of a conversation between speakers in collaboration with the artists participating in this fourth edition. Set out around three conversations, the encounter prompts a reflection, questions and shared references as well as detecting and revealing common interests, connections and potential.
Held on 13, 14 oct 2022
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the fourth 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 Second Skin. Subcutaneous, this latest edition approaches people’s relationship with the world through the skin, understood both in the literal sense, the integumentary system which covers the body of vertebrate animals, and figuratively, the layer or layers of experiences, affection, knowledge, tradition or bodily techniques determining appearance and relationships.
Under the skin, the fabric, the dress or the shawl, under the voice, the structure of language and the human appearance a subcutaneous surface stretches across which, like the skin, operates as a living organ. This second layer, furthermore, appeals to the archive of memories: that which is lived, inherited, learned, which is an unapproachable, hypodermic, printed archive in the lymphatic layer that acts as a membrane fostering symbiotic processes with the environment.
If, as Juhani Pallasmaa writes in The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses (Wiley, 1996 [2012]), “all the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense, like specialisations of skin tissue”, then this programme calls upon us to haptically, sensually and sensorially move closer via works that experiment in and with the edges of the skin. The sonority of the voice, the physical vibration in space, reinforces and confuses the identification of the human voice as an animal roar. The movement of fabric on the body creates tension in the dialogue that dance, as a poetic movement and technical tradition, has held with certain textiles such as the Manila shawl or the tailed gown.
Therefore, in line with the dynamic of previous editions, ESTUDIO IV elicits a step-by-step journey over the course of an afternoon, offering three performances held in two spaces inside the Museo: the Nouvel Building’s Protocol Room, located in the building’s highest point, and Room 102 in the historic Sabatini Building, the site of the former San Carlos Hospital, founded in the eighteenth century. The programme is completed with ESTUDIO IV in Conversation, an encounter organised with dialogues between participating artists and speakers who collaborate in their processes.
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Ángela Bonadies is an artist whose work explores time and memory, that which resists, fades and which is out of place. Her practice sets out from photography, expanding towards mediums such as writing and drawing. She has participated in exhibitions that include A Universal History of Infamy (LACMA, Los Angeles and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, 2017), La pesca (Galería Freijo, Madrid, 2019), Cruzando la línea (Cinemateca Distrital de Bogotá, 2019), De confines y confinamientos (Fundación Municipal Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, 2020) and En las entrañas de la bestia (La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2022).
Ángel Calvo Ulloa is an exhibition curator and art critic with a degree in Art History from the University of Santiago Compostela and an MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Vigo. He has curated exhibitions such as Complexo Colosso (Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães [CIAJG], 2021) and Habitación. Archivo F.X. (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo [CA2M], Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya [MNAC] and La Nau, 2018–2019). Moreover, he has carried out projects for other institutions such as Artium Museoa in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo (MARCO), the Centro de Cultura de España in Mexico (CCEMX) and La Casa Encendida in Madrid, among others. Together with Juan Canela, he has published Desde lo curatorial. Conversaciones, experiencias y afectos (consonni, 2020).
Javiera de la Fuente is an artist and flamenco dancer who explores languages in close proximity to performance in unconventional stage spaces, combining critical reflection and dance in hybrid formats such as the performance lecture. She has performed with this format in the following spaces: Bergen Assembly (Aire del Mar. Canciones de la guerra social contemporánea, 2019), the European Forum For Advanced Practices at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles (El drama de una realidad Sur, 2019) and the Federico García Lorca Foundation in Granada (Una niebla invisible, 2022).
Kike García is a dancer, choreographer and embroiderer. He began learning taekwondo at the age of four and continued towards contemporary dance, butoh and flamenco, bringing together all of these languages of movement. A graduate from the HZT-UdK Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin, he has presented his work with different choreographers in Reykjavik, Madrid, Casablanca, Athens and Berlin. Furthermore, he has transferred his investigations in the field of movement, dance and performance over to embroidery.
Pablo Marte is an artist, writer and researcher who has made audiovisual and film pieces such as Imperial Eyes (2015), Mañana Goodbye (with Marion Cruza Le Bihan, 2016) and Venceremos (with Taxio Ardanaz, 2021). With consonni, he carried out the project El problema está en el medio (2013), the theatre work Again Again(st) (2013) and Pretty Woman (2014), a fictional essay in book format and a curatorial work featuring ten interventions by other artists. Moreover, he has collaborated with researchers like Isabel de Naverán, Aimar Arriola and Idoia Zabaleta. In 2021, he was involved in founding Basilika, a space of cultural critique podcasts, where he produces the programmes Sector Conflictivo and Informe Infame.
Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca is a composer, sound artist and music teacher. He has premiered instrumental, electronic and performance pieces at various national and international festivals, and as a composer and performer he has participated in the stage pieces La Casa, by Aitana Cordero, and ECLIPSE : MUNDO, by Paz Rojo. His audiovisual work has led to his involvement with the ZEMOS98 collective. Since 2012, he has worked closely with the poet María Salgado, most notably on the trilogy of audio-textile works Jinete Último Reino Frag.1-3 (2017–2021). As a performer, he is currently an active part of Fanfarria Transfeminista (Tansfeminist Fanfare) in Madrid.
Alejandra Pombo Su is an artist with a degree in Visual Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, broadening her studies with the MA in Digital Arts from the Pompeu Fabra University and the Independent Studies Programme at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Her work moves between the visual arts, film and performance arts, and she has participated in projects such as What is Third (La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2015) and Mugatxoan (LABoral, in Gijón, Fundação de Serralves, in Porto, and Arteleku de Donostia, 2004–2009). She has also carried out residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida, USA) and the PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), among others.
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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.