Held on 26 Apr 2022
Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations that take place in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. The programme is made up of different thematic strands, the title alluding to the poem Free Union (1931) by André Breton in its definition of psychic automatism as an alternative to rationalism. The transgressive spirit of that poem, which takes apart rational discourse through a lexical juxtaposition to generate other relationships and significations, governs this public programme, in which recitals, readings, debates, performances and actions in these rooms transgress the aura of the white cube.
The first of these events, Avant-garde Gatherings, is activated in rooms 201.01, 201.02 and 201.03. Holy Bohemia. Madrid, Paris, Barcelona and Room 202.03. Stridentopolis. An Urban Utopia, in which a fin de siècle cuplé and a series of machine-like, phonetic sound concerts on these early avant-garde movements are performed. This drift seeks to retrieve the sounds, attitudes and different forms of experiencing the city that shared time and space with this early bohemia via cuplés. The cuplé was conceived as a music genre with a double form: at once iconoclastic, transgressive and sexual and with empowered and feminist lyrics, as well as a mise en scène linked to the absurdism and nonsensicality of Dadaism and its cabaret scenes.
The second part of the programme approaches music and sound poetry in outlying historical avant-garde movements, such as Vibrationism and Ultraism in Spain and Stridentism in Mexico, movements which reflect on sound and modernity and hold a prominent place in the new arrangement of the Museo’s Collection.
This programme resituates such movements from the music and poetry they generated, in parallel to the visual arts, now exhibited in the Museo’s rooms to initiate other dialogues.
Tuesday, 26 April 2022 – 7pm
First part. A Sicaliptic, Ultraist Bohemian Drift
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In homage to all those stars from a forgotten constellation who sang about daily life and urban advances during the long Silver Age.
“The modest and timid writers saw in that woman (La Chelito) a comrade in the struggles against a dark present. They would all break down the walls of boredom [...]”.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, “The Globe and Discovery of La Chelito”, 1930
This drift retrieves the sounds, attitudes and different forms of city living that shared time and space with the bohemia of the Silver Age. Víctor Fuentes ensured that there were three native promotions of bohemians. The rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection is traversed by the second, Holy Bohemia in Madrid, Paris and Barcelona, and the third, where poets from El movimiento V. P. emerged with incendiary words, mocking grins, nihilistic intentions, rebellious gestures and futurist brains. Thus, they journey through the exhibition rooms singing the cuplés that show the other side of the same reality with malice, cunning and implausible equilibrium, the worst ulterior motive and joking around: the predictable ending to the film La revoltosa (The Troublemaker, Florián Rey, 1924) contrasts with the lyrics of Guasa viva (Living Humour), a satire on marriage; those women who “lived the wrong life” — an allusion to the book by Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós from 1901 — demand their place in the pantheon of Madrid’s underworld, the coils of smoke from their cigarettes recalling a time of sensual pleasure and the right to sexual enjoyment; Paris arrives with its light and inspiration; Félix Limendoux, a holy bohemian, invents the term that gives meaning to a large part of the musical production from the time: “the sicalipsis”.
By way of cuplés and concerts that are part of the first programme, these gallant, frivolous and chic women, half epileptic, half syphilitic, gift Picasso a “frivolous queen” and Hermen Anglada Camarasa a Cocaine Tango. Exalted voluptuousness, impotent energies and intoxicated flowers lead to a renewed bohemia, where old young poets and young old poets write a manifesto, publish a magazine and try, unsuccessfully, to provoke a scandal. The voltaic eyes and telescopic legs of new female beauty announce the true “pure ultraism”, and the wonderful poetic dresses of Sonia Delaunay (Sofinka Modernuska) allow poems to be performed now and always.
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Felipe Orejón. Guasa viva (Living Humour)
A creation by Laura Inclán, La Verbeníssima, 2022, based on the premiere by Carmen Flores, 1920
Félix Garzo (lyrics) and Joan Viladomat (music). Fumando espero (Smoking, I Wait)
A creation by Aldegunda Vergara, the cuplé Goddess, 2022, based on the premiere by Pilar Arcos, 1922
Remar y Eddy (lyrics) and Laura Inclán (music). La reina frívola (The Frivolous Queen)
A creation by Laura Inclán, La Verbeníssima, 2022, based on the premiere by Consuelo Hidalgo, 1923. Version set to music by La Verbeníssima in the absence of the original score.
Amichatis (lyrics) and Juan Viladomat (music). Tango de la cocaína (Cocaine Tango)
A creation by Aldegunda Vergara, the cuplé Goddess, 2022, based on the premiere by Ramoncita Rovira, 1926
Joaquín Marino (lyrics) and M. Font de Anta (music). ¡¡Ultraísmo puro!! (Pure Ultraism!!)
A creation by Laura Inclán, La Verbeníssima, 2022, based on the premiere by Amalia de Isaura, 1922
Credits
Performers
Gallant and sicaliptic cuplé singers: Laura Inclán, La Verbeníssima, and Aldegunda Vegara, the cuplé Goddess
Piano: Patricia Pérez
Poetic garment: Drina Marco
Programme: Gloria G. Durán (University of Salamanca)
Segunda parte. Concierto vibracionista y estridentista
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In homage to the vibrationist-ultraist composer Carmen Barradas (1888–1963) and the centenary of her piano recital in the Ateneo de Madrid (1922–2022)
“This is my sister, a spiritual figure and an evasive Russian student, English feminist and Polish or Austrian Pianist”.
Rafael Barradas
This concert spotlights the music and sound poetry of outlying historical avant-garde movements, such as Vibrationism and Ultraism in Spain and Stridentism in Mexico, which reflect on sound and modernity and play a prominent role in the rearrangement of the Collection. From Vibrationism and Ultraism, the music of composer Carmen Barradas is performed, an artist who spent a long period in the shadow of her brother, the painter Rafael Barradas, and whose contribution to Spanish avant-garde art is only just being appreciated now. In 1920, the co-founder of Ultraism, Guillermo de Torre, pointed to her as a unique representative of the “musical ramification” of the movement. Consequently, the concert means to grant recognition and pay homage to the piano recital she performed in the Ateneo de Madrid in 1922. The music is accompanied by the recital of phonetic Ultraist poems released in the same era.
Ultraism also influenced other Latin American avant-garde movements, for instance Mexican Stridentism (1921–1927), the uniqueness of which was based on carrying out a political projection in social and cultural practice. This was made possible by the participation of Stridentists inside Heriberto Jara’s government in the State of Veracruz (1924–1927), rebaptising, among other initiations, the capital, Xalapa, as Stridentopolis. The concert is performed in the room sharing the same name — Room 202.03. Stridentopolis. An Urban Utopia, relating the texts from magazines and books displayed to the visual works exhibited. As an epilogue to the movement and concert, a total artwork joins a mask-megaphone sculpture by Stridentist Germán Cueto, the verbal music of Michel Seuphor and the noise sounds of Futurist Luigi Russolo, carried out inside the framework of the exhibition Cercle et Carré (1930) in Galerie 23 in Paris.
Vibrationism (1917–1920) y ultraism (1918–1926)
Carmen Barradas. Cajita de music (Little Music Box)
Piano, ca. 1915
Carmen Barradas. Fabricación (Manufacturing)
Piano and MIDI version for factory noise, 1922
Rafael Barradas. Bonanitingui
Vibrationist drawing, 1917
Xabier Bóveda. El tranvía (The Tram)
Phonetic poem, 1919
Carmen Barradas. Espera el coche (Waiting for the Car)
Piano and bell, 1923
Carmen Barradas. Poema de una calle (Nocturno) [Poem of a Street] (Night-time)
Piano, 1919
Lucía Sánchez Saornil. Panoramas urbanos (espectáculo) (Urban Landscapes) (Spectacle)
Poem, 1921
Francisco Vighi. Celestiales fuegos artificiales (Celestial Fireworks)
Poem, 1920
Carmen Barradas. Piratas (Pirates)
Piano, 1923. Unfinished manuscript, based on a text by Ultraist José de Ciria y Escalante
Carmen Barradas. Taller mecánico (Mechanical Workshop)
Piano, 1928. Unfinished manuscript
Jacobo Sureda. Concinación (Harmonious)
Phonetic poem, 1926
Fernando María Milicua. A caballo, río y Martín Pescador (Horseback, River and Kingfisher)
Phonetic poem, 1925
Rafael Cansinos Assens. Dada medical (Medical Dada)
Unpublished from Jacques Doucet’s Literary Library. Homage to the failed Ultra-Dada festival, 1921
stridentism (1921–1927)
Manuel Maples Arce. Irradiador estridencial (Stridentist Irradiator)
Calligram, 1923
José Pomar. Piano percusivo para Preludio y fuga rítmicos (Percussive Piano for Rhythmic Prelude and Fugue)
Piano extract with drumstick and piece of wood, 1932
Kyn Taniya. Números (Numbers)
Radiophonic poem, 1924
Xavier Icaza. Panchito Chapopote
Book extract, 1926
Stridentist-Futurist-Geometric Abstraction Epilogue
Germán Cueto with Michel Seuphor and Luigi Russolo. Máscara-megáfono (Mask-Megaphone)
Verbal and noise music, 1930
Credits
Performers
Piano: Patricia Pérez
Voice: Jesús Ge
MIDI: Leopoldo Amigo and Miguel Molina
Mask-megaphone: Paco Benavent
Radio-head: Rosa Mira
Programme: Miguel Molina Alarcón (Universitat Politècnica de València) and José Luis Espejo
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Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
Free Unions
Inside the framework of
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.