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November 27, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
The social value of art in times of crisis
This working group focuses on assessing and analysing the current situation in terms of the social value of contemporary art; the debate concerning the reconstruction of the discourse on its public usefulness and the new forms of funding and new ideas and strategies by which to improve the reception or social impact of art in a context of economic crisis.
It will reflect on the following themes: rethinking the economy of art, as a determining factor of cultural policies; analysis of the new policies and methods of cultural management and, finally, the necessity of artistic education that includes a pedagogy of art and also teaches visual culture and fosters creativity at all levels of education.
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. Opening words
Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of Museo Reina Sofía
Borja Baselga, Director of Fundación Banco Santander
Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Co-director of YGB Art
11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conversation about the new ways to approach cultural management policies and methods, art education, the reception and social impact of art, generating potential lines of action that will improve people’s access to visual culture.
ModeratorIgnacio Paris
ParticipantsMarina Vishmidt, Rubén Martínez, Yaiza Hernández and Juan Arturo Rubio Arostegui
Marina Vishmidt
Writer, researcher and art critic
Rubén Martínez
Researcher and professor. Member of the Metropolitan Observatory of Barcelona
Yaiza Hernández
Professor and researcher. Central Saint Martins School of Art, London
Juan Arturo Rubio Arostegui
Professor and researcher. Universidad Antonio de Nebrija
Ignacio Paris
Artist and writer -
November 27, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Training, research and professionalisation of the field's actors
This working group focuses on evaluating the current situation of the art profession in Spain, in its different areas of activity: research, training and professionalisation. It seeks to define the appropriate scope of action by the different actors, help build links and stimulate exchange and network creation. It also places great importance on encouraging research, looking more in depth at art education at all levels and at the study of Spanish artists.
4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Dialogues about the current situation of the different actors in the Spanish art world, making proposals for lines of action that stimulate exchange and the creation of networks
4:00 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. Dialogue on research: Dora Garcia and Selina Blasco
4:45 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Dialogue on training: Juan Luis Moraza and Isidro López Aparicio
5:30 p.m. - 6:15 p.m. Dialogue on professionalisation: Tam Gryn and Estrella de Diego
6:15 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Conversation among the dialogue participants and the public, moderated by Isidro López-AparicioModerator
Isidro López-Aparicio
Participants
Dora García
Artist
Selina Blasco
Professor and researcher. Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Juan Luis Moraza
Sculptor and professor. Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad de Vigo
Isidro López-Aparicio
Artist, curator and professor. Universidad de Granada
Tam Gryn
Head of Curating Department and Director in Latin America of Artist Pension Trust
Estrella de Diego
Writer and chaired professor of contemporary art. Universidad Complutense de Madrid -
November 28, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
The construction of narratives
This subject will be addressed from the vantage point of critical and other types of narratives. This working group will offer evidence of the limited visibility of existing works and documents and the current preeminence of museums, research groups, art centres and independent production bodies, to the detriment of the university.
The group also seeks to make connections between younger research groups, to shake up the current discourse in order to generate new tools of analysis and narrative strategies. All done with a view to increasing the visibility of landmarks and processes of a different nature, thus breaking with the inertias and circularity produced by existing discourses. Finally, the channels used for the dissemination and circulation of ideas will be re-examined.
10 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conversation in which questions concerning the research work currently underway in the different art professions and university contexts will be addressed, with special attention going to the reasons for their limited visibility. The participants will propose lines of action conducive to the creation of ties between young researchers and different art forums.
ModeratorPatricia Mayayo
10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Conversation (1st session): Juan Albarrán, Jorge Luis Marzo and Valentín Roma
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Conversation (2nd session): Jesús Carrillo, Lola Jiménez-Blanco and Glòria Picazo
ParticipantsJuan Albarrán
Professor at the Duke Center for Hispanic Studies, in Madrid, and professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Jorge Luis Marzo
Curator, writer and professor. BAU School of Design, Barcelona
Valentín Roma
Historian, curator and professor of aesthetics and digital culture. Elisava School of Design, Barcelona
Jesús Carrillo
Head of Cultural Programs at Museo Reina Sofía
Lola Jiménez-Blanco
Professor of Art History. Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Glòria Picazo
Art critic and curator Director of Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida
Patricia Mayayo
Professor of Art History. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid -
November 28, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Art, collectionism and creation of heritage
The topics addressed by this working group are the current situation of the art market and of the collector in relation to public bodies, museums and the Public Administration. Special emphasis will be placed on fiscal questions, such as the Patronage Act (Ley de Mecenazgo), due to its impact on the creation of contemporary art heritage. The references used are a report on the Spanish art market in 2012 (Informe del mercado del arte español en 2012), published by the Fundación Arte y Mecenazgo, and a report on the status of Spanish culture (Informe del mercado del arte español en 2012. Una aproximación al estado y el sistema de las artes visuales de 2011).
Given the current context, the group finds it especially worthwhile to examine, from the perspective of the collector and the museum, questions related to the limited presence of Spanish art abroad, reflecting on the shortcomings that prevent Spanish art from finding a place in the international scene and proposing actions that will encourage and consolidate the relationship between public entities and private collections. The group will also underline the crucial role played by far-reaching, varied and high-quality dissemination campaigns.
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Lecture by Nacho Ruiz: The future is not what it used to be. New strategies for new scenarios in Spain’s art market
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Conversation about topics related to the collector and the museum. Reflection will focus on the shortcomings that prevent or hinder the contextualisation and visibility of Spanish art in the international setting, proposing lines of action.
Moderator
João Fernandes
ParticipantsPatrizia Sandretto, Jaime Sordo and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro
Nacho Ruiz
Art gallerist and historian
Patrizia Sandretto
Collector and President of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Jaime Sordo
Entrepreneur, collector, President of the Association of Private Collectors of Contemporary Art 9915
Gabriel Pérez Barreiro
Director and chief curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection
João Fernandes
Deputy Art Director at Museo Reina Sofía -
November 28, 2013 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Autonomy and the creation of networks
The Autonomy and the creation of networks working group explores these questions by looking at specific practices that are conducive to creating networks, rather than using previous definitions or theoretical frameworks. Of particular interest are the networks formed not by actors of the same type – such as museum networks or professional associations – but rather heterogeneous, even conflictive, collaborations that involve both cultural producers and the public.
The idea is to look at partnership and artistic creation in terms of their capacity – and their limitations – in generating collective expressions and social fabric. Transversality, the questioning of institutional consolidation and the power of contagion of these hybrid partnerships allow us to consider production and circulation alternatives for artistic practices, and also the emergence of new expressions of different autonomous ways of doing things.
5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Conversation on different experiences pertaining to partnership work.
Moderators: Támara Díaz and Fernando López (Museo Reina Sofía)
Participants: Joaquín Vázquez (BNV, Seville), Eva Fernández (Cine sin autor, Madrid), Marisa Pérez (Fundación de los Comunes) and Emily Pethick (Cluster)
7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Closing words and presentation of conclusions by moderatorsParticipants
Joaquín Vázquez
Co-founder of BNV Producciones
Eva Fernández
Writer and founder of Cine sin Autor
Marisa Pérez
Co-ordinator of Fundación de los Comunes
Emily Pethick
Director of The Showroom and member of the networks Common Practice and Cluster in London
Tamara Díaz
Researcher and curator. Exhibitions Department at Museo Reina Sofía
Fernando López
Cultural manager and researcher. Exhibitions Department at Museo Reina Sofía
Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain
Held on 27 Nov 2013
Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, the aim of which is generate proposals based on a critical diagnosis of the contemporary art system in Spain and its international projection, taking into account different points of view and bringing together all voices. The event will be open to the public and will also be streamed live on the project’s website.
The project seeks to heighten the visibility of the achievements and values generated in contemporary art over the last two decades and to identify practices and attitudes that hamper the development of its full potential, especially at the international level. Its priority objective is to develop action proposals that respond adequately to the challenges currently faced by the field of contemporary art and culture in Spain. [dropdown]
Work began in November of 2012 with an initial gathering of professionals from the art world, during which five groups focusing on fundamental topics were organised. The participants’ efforts over the last year have led to the creation of a contemporary art observatory (Observatorio Horizontes del Arte contemporáneo en España). The conclusions drawn thus far are available on the project’s website.
One year after the first Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain event, the upcoming symposium will bring together a number of agents from the current contemporary art scene. It hopes to increase public awareness of the issues explored by the Observatory’s working groups, and also to put forward conclusions and proposals that may be useful in improving the projection of Spanish contemporary art around the world. It will follow a dynamic and participatory format, based on a series of lectures, dialogues and conversations about the five key topics. [/dropdown]
Coordinated by
YGBArt
Organised by
Fundación Banco Santander and Museo Reina Sofía
Más actividades
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.
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra
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.