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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Patio
Museo Reina Sofía and Radio 3 join up to celebrate International Museum Day
This day will see the radio station Radio 3 broadcast its programmes via a set that will be put together specifically for the occasion in the Museo’s Nouvel Patio. Radio 3’s customary schedule will be joined by acoustic performances from artists such as Manel, Izal, Hinds, Kiko Veneno, Óscar Mulero, Amaral... Niño de Elche, beGun, Fuel Fandango, Anaut, Muchachito, Amatria, Carmen Boza, Jorge Drexler, Alex Cooper, Corizonas, Los Nastys, Jayme Marques, Paloma del Sol, Novedades Carminha, Coque Malla, Los Mambo Jambo, Neuman, Anni B. Sweet, Modelo de Respuesta Polar, Ariadna Castellanos con Ed is Dead, Menil, Miss Caffeina, Lichis, Maika Makovski, Verónica Ferreiro, El Twangero, Papaya, and other pop-music figures. The final hours of the day will be uplifted by DJs and dance music, and part of the programmes will be streamed and can be followed on the Radio 3 website.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Niño de Elche: Animal Número
He has been called iconoclastic, toxic, refined, subversive, masterly, irreverent, and even the Antichrist of flamenco. In 2015 his record Voces del extremo was named album of the year by music critics. A rare breed, a philosopher, poet, mystic and politician who elevates and reclaims. With in-depth knowledge of tradition and blessed with a voice like an instrument, Niño de Elche transcends academic structures to create and express himself with total and brilliant freedom.
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May 18, 2016 Sabatini Building, Floor 1. Room 102
Company Carmen Fumero: …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock)
To mark International Museum Day, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a piece awarded first prize in the 2015 Madrid Choreography Competition: the dance piece entitled …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock), created by Carmen Fumero and Miguel Ballabriga.
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May 18, 2016
Guided tours around the Collection and exhibitions
Guided tours with volunteers around Collection 1
Time: 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThis tour offers a brief introduction to the key points that articulate the Museo’s Collection 1, which begins at the end of the 19th century and focuses on the tensions that shape modernity and historical avant-garde movements through works by Picasso, Dalí and Miró.
Apropos of… Campo Cerrado
Time: 12 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe exhibition Campo Cerrado. Spanish Art 1939–1953 explores the cultural and artistic landscape of the early years under the Franco regime. In the face of the traditional historiographical obscurantism which reinforced clichés like the scarcity and irrelevance of cultural activity in the 1940s, this exhibition touches on the relationship between art and power at that time and on the ways of adapting or resisting that were adopted by artists. The exhibition includes works by Max Aub, Robert Capa, Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Dalí, Josep Guinovart, Maruja Mallo, Manuel Millares, Julia Minguillón, Joan Miró, Edgar Neville, Antoni Tàpies, Josefa Tolrá, Remedios Varo and Ignacio Zuloaga, among others.
Apropos of… Wifredo Lam
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe guided tour around the retrospective exhibition on Wifredo Lam presents a broad set of pictorial works, drawings, prints and ceramics by the Cuban artist, as well as numerous documents: letters, photographs, magazines and books that accompany and contextualise the show’s chronological narrative.
Apropos of… Rémy Zaugg
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Meeting point: Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez Entrance
Capacity: 20 peopleA guided tour around the first monographic exhibition on Rémy Zaugg in Spain. Zaugg was one of the most prolific and versatile Swiss artists in the second half of the 20th century, and his interests were not confined to painting, despite this being his foremost discipline. He also worked and explored urbanism, curated exhibitions and wrote as a way of exploring the key elements in the creative process.
Seen and Unseen
Time: 18:30 h
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Attendance: via prior registration at mediacion@museoreinasofia.esIn this visit, geared towards the general public, a visually impaired person and an educator specialised in accessibility put forward multisensorial strategies for approaching art. By virtue of this initiative, the Museo gives value to the ways that the visually impaired perceive and approach art, and it invites visitors to an innovative experience of sensorial alteration and “denormalization” when contemplating artworks.
Feminism
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe Feminism tour covers the spaces inside the Museo’s Collection, those devoted to historical avant-garde movements that question the role and visibility of women throughout the history of art through an analysis of female figures as producers, recipients and subjects-objects of artistic production. This tour aims to evoke a new perspective for visitors that critically considers images of male domination and acknowledges women’s work in overcoming these roles and models.
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May 18, 2016
Tour around the Museo’s Central Archive
Meeting point: Nouvel Building, Library Access
Admission: via prior registration at archivo@museoreinasofia.es, indicating your name and surname(s), and ID number
Capacity: 15 people
Duration: 1:30 hThe documentary collection housed by the Museo’s Central Archive opens a gateway into history, or, more specifically, into the institution’s holdings. The visit enters into dialogue with the archive and its role(s), making special reference to the history of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive: its itinerary, the documentation it conserves and the services it offers interested citizens.
To illustrate this presentation, a selection of special-interest documents including artists’ correspondence, reports on artwork restoration, documents related to the institution’s activity, and projects to expand the Museo building will be displayed, in addition to other materials.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Center. Space D, Floor 0
Guided tour around the exhibition Colectivo Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.), 1979-1985
With the show’s curator, Francisco Godoy Vega
The exhibition Colectivo Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.), 1979-1985 brings together a broad selection of materials from the Archive and work of C.A.D.A., which have been recently acquired by the Museo through dialogue with the material’s custodians, Lotty Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit, and via research by Red de Conceptualismos del Sur.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Study Centre, Floor 5
BookJockey session with Fosi Vegue from Blank Paper Escuela
Science and Fiction: A Journey in Which the Photographic Document Transcends an Unknown Dimension
Blank Paper Escuela puts forward BookJockey, an experimental format with which to show and enjoy photobooks. It involves a DJ session with contemporary photographic books, displaying and mixing materials to create a narrative which prompts the audience to perceive them differently.
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May 18, 2016
Tours around the Conservation-Restoration Area
Meeting point: calle Santa Isabel, 52 (office entrance), ten minutes before the start of the tour
Admission: full capacity
Capacity: 10 people
Duration: 40 minutesThe Museo’s Conservation-Restoration team offers two tours around the studio where they perform their work, which corresponds to a rigorous working methodology in line with the regulatory and professional criteria applied to the international museum world. As a result, the public can gain a first-hand understanding of the restoration processes currently being carried out.
Restoration programme developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Mapfre.
International Museum Day 2016
- Live Arts
- Guided Tour

Held on 18 May 2016
On 18 May the Museo Reina Sofía will host a special programme to celebrate International Museum Day, held worldwide since 1977. The idea is to share a day of celebrations with visitors, who will be able to gain a better understanding of the lesser-known spaces and sides of the institution and feel part of its programme, exhibitions and working process.
In 2016 the radio station Radio 3 will join in with the festivities, and from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. the Radio 3 schedule will be broadcast from the Nouvel Patio, where it will welcome a wide array of special guests from the music and art scenes. Dance, music and a number of guided tours around exhibitions, departments and areas in the Museo will form the day’s programme.
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Más actividades

Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.

A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.

Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.

Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.