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
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.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 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.
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.
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026 - Registration deadline extended
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.
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.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?