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16 May, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Suely Rolnik. For the Ethics of Thought
Admission: Free entry, until full capacity is reached
Walking around the Möbius strip with Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, this conference sees Suely Rolnik develop the idea of life as a topological surface on which strength and form are inseparable. The paradoxical relationship that exists between the aesthetic-clinical relationship of strengths (knowing body), on one side, and the cultural-sensitive evaluation of form, on the other, triggers desire as an action of thought capable of reshaping reality at its points of asphyxiation, in the words of the Brazilian psychoanalyst. Rolnik questions different politics in the production of thoughts, based on the notions of subjectivity when faced with this inescapable paradox. The focus reverts back to the notion that Rolnik renders on the colonial unconsciousness marked by the subconscious repression of the knowing body in the production of thought, desire and subjectivity. According to the author, such repression forms the basis of modern Western culture and represents an essential part of its colonising enterprise from a micropolitical perspective as it is imposed on suppressed societies. Thus, the return of the repressed body in the exercise of thought depends on the necessary strength and guile to mock the colonial subconscious, which today still structures subjectivity and orients desires at play. These outbreaks happen in the current world as injections of the knowing body in the dying anthrophallecentric arteries of Western modernity in crisis.
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17 May, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
José Antonio Sánchez, Fernando Quesada, Óscar Cornago, Ixiar Rozas, Quim Pujol, Esther Belvis. Round Table
Admission: Free entry, until full capacity is reached
Dispersion has affected all possible spheres, diluting the borders between the public and private, work and occupation, intimacy and publicity, in which theatricality from affection plays a key role after having jumped from traditional spheres to others that previously lacked full validity. Faced with this situation, at certain points the discourse moves towards future nostalgia when it comes to repositioning limits erased by the totalising effect of dispersion. This table, comprised of course directors and members of the ARTEA research group, offers an idea-sharing session involving the materials reviewed over the course of the year on the networks of affection and certain hypotheses, such as the space for collaborations, artistic practice from the care for or defence of the independence of life, not art.
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15, 16, 17 and 18 May, 2014 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Presentation of projects, stage interventions and encounters
The project presentations, as well as the encounters and stage interventions, belong to the following lines of investigation:
Archives of Affection
Why archive? What is there beyond the inventory, and can experience be collected? With participation from Ana Salomé Branco, Paloma Calle, Rosa Casado, Joan Casellas, Nieves Correa, Belén Cueto, Bruno Leitão, Rosell Meseguer, Javier Núñez, Joseph Patricio and Catarina Simão, Archives of Affection, coordinated by Óscar Cornago and Zara Rodríguez, is the continuation of an investigation space for stage practices about the ways of finding and identifying ourselves socially, the place of affection and the culture of work. The exchange of the relation, the immediacy of the present, the changing experience of the other and living memory are some of the places from which to reconsider the sense of archive, the relationship with history and profitability as a principle of social organisation.
Expanded Theatricalities
This year’s course is devoted to an investigation into networks of affection as a space for theatricality. The range of practices this seminar will address from these diverse perspectives is broad, and comprises small-format experiences, intimate work laboratories that create personal spaces based on affection, which are not penetrated by the colonisation of the dramatic (or if it occurs it is managed as another form of theatricality with which to experiment), workshops in which the emphasis on the creation of an ‘us’ based on emotion that can be found on the edges of the stage circuit.
Inhabiting Dispersion
Held on 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 May 2014
Theatricality, which at one time could have been considered an exclusive condition of the public, has spread into traditionally private spheres: the home, friendship and in relationships of coexistence and. In parallel, privacy has flowed into these spheres, and it is from here that a theatricality of affection, even a theatricality of love, can be critically activated to serve life.
This seminar forms part of a tri-annual project that explores the expanded action in new areas: the public sphere, the city, the home, networks of affection, schools and educational spaces. Inhabiting Dispersion is held in collaboration with the project Archives of Affection, in which different artistic proposals approach the archive as a living space of relationships. It culminates als with a programme of critical practices devoted to an investigation into “networks of affection” as a space of theatricality.
In collaboration with
Framework
Imaginarios sociales II: la idea de acción en la sociedad posindustrial. Documentación, teoría y análisis de las artes escénicas contemporáneas (HAR 2011-28767). Plan Nacional de I+D del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Teatralidades disidentes (HAR2012-34075). Plan Nacional de I+D del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Organised by
ARTEA and Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Esther Belvis. A member of ARTEA, researcher, writer and educator with an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Óscar Cornago. A member of ARTEA. Researcher at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid CSIC. In recent years he has coordinated the volumes Utopías de la proximidad en el contexto de la globalización. La creación escénica en Iberoamérica (2010), A veces me pregunto por qué sigo bailando. Prácticas de la intimidad (2012) and Manual de emergencia en prácticas escénicas. Comunidad y economías de la precariedad (2014).
Quim Pujol. Writer, artist and curator. He has participated in research projects such as “Autonomía y complejidad” or "Arte y ciencia ficción" and has collaborated in publications like Artributos, Efímera, Maska or Repensar la dramaturgia. He is co-curator of La estrategia doméstica and the Secció Irregular at the Mercat de les Flors and professor in the Independent Studies Programme at the MACBA.
Fernando Quesada. A member of ARTEA, architect and senior lecturer of architectural projects at the University of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid). Participates at the MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture at the University. He is author of the books La Caja Mágica. Cuerpo y Escena (2005) and Del cuerpo a la red (2014).
Suely Rolnik. A senior lecturer at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where she runs the Core interdisciplinary studies on subjectivity in the Clinical Psychology Postgraduate course, and honorary professor in the Independent Studies Programme at the MACBA. She is author of Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo (in collaboration with Félix Guattari, 2006).
José Antonio Sánchez. A lecturer of the History of Art at the University of Castilla La Mancha (UCLM) and director of the MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture. A member of ARTEA (Madrid). Noteworthy publications include Dramaturgias de la imagen (2002) and Prácticas de lo real en la escena contemporánea (2007).
Students and artists invited to the presentations of projects:
Tamara Ascanio, Marta Battistella, Mike Brookes, Ana Salomé Branco, Paloma Calle, Marie Capesius, Rosa Casado, Joan Casellas, Nieves Correa, Belén Cueto, María José Cifuentes, Circo Interior Bruto, Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski, Óscar G. Villegas, Ana Harcha, Lila Insúa, María Jerez, Bruno Leitao, Rosell Meseguer, Javier Núñez Gasco, Mariona Naudin, Joseph Patricio, Luciana Pereyra Agoff, Huemulita Pitrufkén, Germán de la Riva, Anto Rodríguez and Catarina Simao.
Más actividades
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 25th March, 2026 – 7.00pm
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 Feni’s work. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela addresses the trauma of apartheid from both aesthetic and oneiric perspectives. 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 Museum’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24th March, 2026 – 6.30pm
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). 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 Museum from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
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