From Malaise. Community Mental Health and Critical Institutionalism
Critical Node
Held on 10, 29 mar, 12, 26 abr, 17 may 2023
In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.
From such a collective process, which solidifies in the RRS Radio podcast From Malaise and aims to expand research towards new gazes, comes this new Critical Node in 2023, part of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme.
This new stage continues by exploring the ways of living and facing contradictions inside and outside institutions, from first-person experience, artistic practice, institutional work and activism.
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Entrar Afuera is a militant research collective which explores forms of social care, considering and acting in relation to the link between public institutions and territories. Its participants live and work in Madrid and Trieste, in Italy. This Node features the participation of Marta Pérez and Irene Rodríguez Newey.
Locus* (Nada Colectivo) is a project based in the vulnerable Puente de Vallecas neighbourhood in Madrid, exploring the confluence of community culture and mental health. It subverts the concept of “a safe place” — which in psychiatric hegemony is related to spaces of police containment and health — through different contemporary creative languages and stressing co-existence with madness rooted in mutual support. This Node features the participation of Francesca Alessandro and Ana CSC.
Museo en Red is an area in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department which works to develop sustained dialogue and collaborations with different national and international agents and collectives, both in the artistic sphere and in activism and thought. This Node features the participation of Sara Buraya Boned and Celina Poloni.
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Friday, 10 March 2023 - 6:30 pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops
The Culture of Malaise
This session aims to reflect on, embody and put forward tools of care which subvert the hegemonic concept of malaise — ableist, punitivist, iatrogenic; namely that which is caused by the medical institution — towards a radical concept (imaginative, collectivist, anti-establishment) that acts as a bridge to the sessions that follow. Therefore, it approaches certain key concepts related to psychological malaise, its history as a social agent and its politicisation as a force of resistance from the optics of the international social movement Orgullo Loco (Mad Pride) and from the specific experience of the cultural project Locus*.
Wednesday, 29 March 2023 - 6:30pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops and Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Genealogies of Art and Madness
In a drift through the Museo, this session seeks to explore different narratives from, and on, madness, stressing how they become inserted inside accounts on mental health and other forms of contemporary malaise in exhibition space. Moreover, starting from the history of the Museo Reina Sofía as a former hospital, it explores its roles as a public art institution, understanding it at once as a space of representation and care and political imagination.
Wednesday, 12 April 2023 - 6:30pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops
Work and Precarity
In a society where people’s mental health is linked to their capacity to produce, the logics of paid work — or the lack thereof — increase the risk of encountering psychological suffering. This third section articulates the crossroads between work and health, analysing how production dynamics contaminate all realms of life, inhabiting and interpreting the tensions produced from the socio-economic sphere and generating creative strategies of introspection, self-defence and micro-politics.
Wednesday, 26 April 2023 - 6:30pm / To be announced soon
Institutionalism, Malaise and Care Practices
The lives of human beings pass in almost permanent contact with institutions such as schools, medical centres and museums, places where life is created, cared for and sustained but also spaces that are ultimately unable to open out and understand and welcome the lives of those who inhabit them. In this collective session, Entrar Afuera sets forth a journey through such territories swamped with norms, walls and pre-defined power logics, analysing their contradictions in an exercise of imagination which sheds light on how to make possible, and who does so, other forms of institutionalism.
Wednesday, 17 May 2023 - 6:30 h / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Radio as Bonfire
The closing session of the Critical Node From Malaise is put forward as a sound laboratory which explores the possibilities of radio as a practice of collective communication. which sheds light on how to make possible, and who does so, other forms of institutionalism.
Organised by
Entrar Afuera, Locus* (Nada Colectivo) and Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
Participants
Participants
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work 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.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.