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Monday 11, Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 February 2019 – from 5 to 8pm
Workshop
Opus17aSlimeVariation#14 for acoustic bass instruments
Conducted by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL)
Registration at sonido@museoreinasofia.esThis workshop is organised as a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía Education Department and Madrid’s Escuela Municipal de Música and is aimed at musicians who play acoustic bass instruments, for instance the bass drum, the double bass, the bassoon, the double bassoon, the tuba, the bass flute, the double contrabass flute, the bass sax and the contrabass sax. The workshop’s experimental methodology focuses on producing a new variation of Darboven’s work.
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Thursday, 14 February 2019 – from 7 to 8pm
Lecture
Folds
Given by EVOL
Free, until full capacity is reachedThis lecture is an approach to the idea of folds on multiple levels, frequently jumping between the physical act of folding and other purely metaphorical folds to trace an imaginary network of interconnections between the act of folding and the warping of reality. The fold is one of the simplest and most effective methods of transformation – simply folding a piece of paper allows us to divide it into new segments, alter its stiffness, change its volume, modify the information contained within. To fold means to mutilate, but not solely on a physical level. The Latin word flectere, from which the word fold derives, points to a more metaphorical bending, to the curve, to torsion. Each time we imagine the impossible, we curve and twist possibility. Each time we modify our notion of reality, we are folding inside it.
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Friday, 15 February 2019 – from 7:30 to 8:30pm
Concert
Opus17aSlimeVariation#14 for acoustic bass instruments and Opus17aSlimeVariation#15 for computer
Free, until full capacity is reached
EVOL’s computer reinterpretation of Darboven’s work entails adding different layers to an already complex work by the very nature of its length. Yet on this occasion, one further difficulty is added: retransforming the musical notes from acoustic instruments to EVOL’s computer programming language. What is put forward is a seemingly paradoxical exercise between computer-based performance, supposedly with delay, and interpretations with supposedly live acoustic instruments.
Held on 11 feb 2019
Throughout her life, German artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) produced different compositions with scores stretching across – in much the same way as her installations – large-scale numerical tables on paper. According to Darboven, her “systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations”.
The starting point of Opus 17a is a series of music pieces Darboven began in 1984 under the title Wunschkonzert, a kind of calendar where the numbers are replaced by notes. This four-part opus work for cello is also divided into 36 poems comprising 6 pages each, thus creating a 1,008-page score, performed, on numerous occasions, across around 100 minutes of music. In 2007, Robert Black performed the piece for an album released by DIA Art Foundation.
Since 2014, EVOL – Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp – have conceived 13 variations of Darboven’s score, the first of which was performed at the UnSound Festival in New York. On this occasion in the Museo Reina Sofía, EVOL will perform a concert of two of these variations, and will also give a lecture on folds’ capacity to transform reality and conduct a workshop for acoustic bass instruments.
The name EVOL comes from the Catalan word for Sambucus Ebulus, a herbaceous species of elder with a characteristic foetid smell. Under this moniker, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp make what they call 'computer music for hooligans' or 'rave synthesis'.
In collaboration with
Madrid’s Escuela Municipal de Música
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.