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Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Laboratory. Guided tour and meeting
Mapa Teatro
Sabatini Building, Exhibition Rooms – 11:00 am
Laboratory. Guided tour of the exhibition Mapa Teatro: Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity with Mapa Teatro and José Antonio Sánchez (prior registration required)Sabatini Building, Auditorium – 4:00 pm
Laboratory. Encounter with Mapa Teatro (prior registration required)
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Thursday, 4 April 2019 – 7:00 pm
The Living Museum
International premiere
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
International premiere of the performance piece by Mapa Teatro The Living Museum, based on an earlier piece by the collective, The Farewell (2017), which tells the real story of the creation and maintenance of a museum by a group of Colombian soldiers in El Borugo, a former FARC camp located in the Amazon rainforest, where the soldiers re-enact, in front of visitors, the conditions of their imprisoned and tortured comrades from the past.
Mapa Teatro
Performance lecture: The Living Museum and Laboratory
Mapa Teatro. La despedida [The Farewell]. Theatre piece, 2017
Held on 04 abr 2019
The transdisciplinary collective Mapa Teatro explores the mechanisms that build history, myth and fiction. Their theatre pieces, halfway between installations and new dramaturgies, dissect the violence which has so dominated Colombian society in recent years and dismantle the imaginaries created by colonial reason. In conjunction with the unveiling of the exhibition Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, inside the Fissures Programme framework, Mapa Teatro will present a twofold laboratory comprising a guided tour around the show in the morning and an encounter later in the day with José Antonio Sánchez, an Art History lecturer from the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca) and theorist whose work centres on the relationship between performing and visual arts. The program will be completed with the performance lecture The Living Museum on 4 April 2019.
The Living Museum is a performance lecture which, despite taking place in the Auditorium, strikes up a dialogue with the pieces displayed in the galleries, interrelating two spaces, stage and exhibition, which overlap in this collective’s research. Moreover, it reflects upon the use of the museum institution in memory, collective peace processes and the manufacturing of history. The Living Museum also sets out from an earlier Mapa Teatro piece, La despedida (The Farewell, 2017), and is based on the real case of a group of soldiers who created and ran a museum in El Borugo, a former FARC camp, liberated today, located in the Amazon rainforest, where the guerrilla group held kidnapped soldiers and police. In this museum of historical recreation, soldiers now re-stage, under the visitors’ gaze, the conditions of their imprisoned and tortured comrades. Thus, The Living Museum is an interpretation of the relations between fiction, theatricality and reality.
This reflection is expanded upon on 31 October in a laboratory which surveys the creative process of the exhibition held in the Museo and is set in motion with an investigation into the Sabatini Building’s initial use as a hospital. Following on from an artist-led guided tour, audience members will attend and participate in a conversation between the artists and performing arts theorist José Antonio Sanchez as the laboratory illuminates the processes of translating and transposing texts, documents and archives in theatre fictions and devices.
The Living Museum in collaboration with
Laboratory in collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Participants
Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of artists who work on transdisciplinary creation. Founded in Paris in 1984 by Colombian theatre and visual artists Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro has been based in Bogotá since 1986. Their work experimentally extends across performance, installation, opera, theatre and ethnographic film and has been on view at international theatre festivals such as the Avignon Festival, the Paris Autumn Festival and FIND in Berlin, and in art institutions like the São Paulo Biennial and SFMOMA.
José Antonio Sánchez is an Art History lecturer at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca). He is the co-director, with Victoria Pérez Royo, of the MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida, the Teatros del Canal Dance Centre, the Azala Space for Creation and Teatro Pradillo. He is also the author and editor of a broad number of publications on the relationship between performing and visual arts, for instance Prácticas de lo real en la escena contemporánea (2007 and 2012) and Artes de la escena y de la acción en España 1978-2002 (2006).
![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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
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
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
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.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.