-
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
![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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
12 DIC 2025
This second instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common space, comprises three sessions with Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker Christian Nyampeta and Ècole du soir. The programme’s first session screens video works made by Nyampeta, while the second sets forth a dialogue on the creative processes of Ècole du soir. The third brings proceedings to a close with the screening of a film selected by the artist: Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992).
The work of Christian Nyampeta encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
The New York-based artist from Rwanda uses art and museums to create spaces of encounter and common learning that predate colonial education models. Via popular culture frames of reference like comics, music and film, Nyampeta develops dynamics and spaces from which to build experiences which redress the wounds of diaspora and its consequences; further, his work recovers, makes visible and heals — through a pedagogical and artistic process — the social divides of the African people. With Ècole du soir he also works on creations without authorship and uses the counter-ethnographic legacy of novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembène as a tool to deconstruct the Western view of Africa.