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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
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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?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
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.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.