From Malaise. Community Mental Health and Critical Institutionalism
Critical Node
Held on 10, 29 Mar, 12, 26 Apr, 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
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.