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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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
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.