Held on 14 nov 2018
Laurie Anderson will conduct a performance in the Museo Reina Sofía to tie in with the publication of her latest book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood (Rizzoli, 2018), a survey of a career spanning more than forty years. She will explore themes such as loss, memory and narration, transforming and blending poetry, language and new technology, sound experimentation and observations on sculptures, operas and multimedia installations to articulate a hybrid space, where the limits of testimony, fiction and feeling become blurred. This one-off performance lecture by Anderson, the only one of its kind in Spain, includes multimedia screenings, interventions on code, voice and digital language, and reflections on past works – from operas to installations — and is based on this latest volume, which comprises every performance by the artist, in addition to some of her essays on language and narration.
The activity is framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s recent exploration of the correlations between live arts and visual arts, with this search giving rise to interventions in the Museo by pivotal musicians, choreographers and dancers in this these relationships — Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Joan La Barbara, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti — and to the display of the part of the Collection angled towards these reciprocal influences and effects. Thus, different rooms will bear witness to the way in which the body and time have been brought into contemporary art through dance, music and sound since 1960.
The performance by Laurie Anderson, one of the foremost artists of our time, constitutes another landmark in the Museo’s exploration. Her work stands at the advent of sound experimentation with language and multimedia performance, in the common space between experimental music and contemporary art, through two main ideas: the first, that all experience is mediated by technology and thus produced artificially — Anderson is a pioneer in the consideration of how society is dominated by virtual reality, where reality itself is merely another element. The second, that all artistic practice is a form of narration. Her work, which straddles music, performance, the visual arts and film, takes these mediums and experiments with story-telling, using language to create meaning. It advances and develops an interest in experimental fiction as a way of producing other presents.
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Participants
Laurie Anderson (Glen Ellyn, Illinois, 1947) has explored performance, electronic music, the visual arts and film equally. She has released ten albums, among them Big Science (1982), Mister Heartbreak (1984), Home of the Brave (1986), a soundtrack to the film of the same name, Life On A String (2001) and Homeland (2010). O Superman, a minimal track with a vocal spoken through a vocoder, marked the start of post-modern culture, according to art critic Craig Owens, and reached number two in the British pop charts. She has also composed the music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, choreographic works by Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones and Molissa Fenley, and Far Side of the Moon, Robert Lepage’s stage production.
Anderson has toured internationally with spoken word and complex multimedia performances such as United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), The Nerve Bible (1995) and Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999), based on Herman Melville’s novel. Her visual work has been the subject of solo and collective exhibitions in major European and American museums, and as a film-maker her productions include Home of the Brave (1984) and Heart of a Dog (2005), as well as a broad array of videos.
Moreover, she has received different awards and honours, for instance the Pratt Institute’s Legends Award in 2011, the Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize for her contribution to the arts (2007), the Deutsche Schallplatten Award for the album Life On A String (2001) and numerous other distinctions from the National Endowment of Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2002 she became NASA’s first artist in residence for her tireless technology research.
![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
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.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
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The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
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This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
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Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.