Held on 28 oct, 05, 12, 19 nov 2019
This series of tours around the exhibition Mario Merz. Time is Mute takes a closer look at the relationship between the ideas underpinning the work of the Italian artist and contemporary thought on nature. The view of nature, from Romanticism to Arte Povera; the origins of architecture in nature and the meaning of dwelling linked to existence; contemporary eco-social philosophy; and the correspondence between object and language are the themes that make up these visits.
The point of departure of Mario Merz’s work, inscribed in the Arte Povera movement, is the re-affirmation of nature to criticise contemporary compulsive economic developmentalism. Some of his most idiosyncratic elements, such as igloos, natural materials (clay, wood, wax, coal) and allusions to energy, contrast with the neutral, orthogonal and manufactured forms of coetaneous American Minimalism. Arte Povera and Minimalism both draw on the employment of primary elements, a procedural conception of time and the imposing physical presence of the art object, yet, while Minimalism glorifies forms of late-industrial society, Arte Povera returns to an atavistic, ritualistic and primitive idea of nature. It is no coincidence that this movement surfaced around May ’68, in post-industrial Italy and the birth of post-Workerism philosophy, which studies the transformation of any form of experience into a commodity. Thus, nature becomes a plea for another possible society and a rejection of a new hypercapitalist world.
Based on the principles of the exhibition, the four tours converse from different viewpoints, seeking to frame the artist in a broader system of relationships. In the first, Javier Arnaldo analyses the view of nature as an outpouring of imagination and as the crisis of the subject, from the sublime of nineteenth-century Romanticism to the countercultural allusions of Arte Povera; the second sees María Teresa Muñoz explore the connections between Mario Merz’s pieces and the cabin, and the archaic origins of architecture, present in the primitivism of the architects who were the artist’s contemporaries — Aldo van Eyck, José Miguel de Prada Poole and Buckminster Füller — and in indigenous cultures; in the third tour Emilio Santiago posits answers to the question: In what way can contemporary ecological thought challenge a system based on endless accumulation?; the fourth and final visit is devised as an open letter from Julia Spínola to Mario Merz, two artists who, although separated by generations, share an interest in translating the verbal language of objects.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Javier Arnaldo is a lecturer ofArt History at Madrid’s Complutense University. He has written about the aesthetics of Romantic idealism in Fragmentos para una teoría romántica del arte (Tecnos, 1987), Estilo y naturaleza. La obra de arte en el Romanticismo alemán (Visor, 1990), Goethe: Naturaleza, arte, verdad (Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2012) and Vemos lo que sabemos. La cultura de la visión en Goethe (Abada, 2019). Furthermore, Arnaldo has explored the cultural history of art’s avant-garde movements in books and exhibitions like Las vanguardias históricas (Historia 16, 1993), Musical Analogies. Kandinsky and his Contemporaries (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2003), Brücke. The Birth of German Expressionism(Fundación Caja Madrid and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2005), and 1914! The Avant-garde and the Great War (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2008).He is director of the Complutense Research Group S U+M A [Universidad+Museo] and was senior researcher at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza from 2001 to 2011.
María Teresa Muñoz is an architect who holds a Doctorate in Architecture from Madrid’s School of Architecture and a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto (Canada). She has worked as a professor of Architectural Projects at Madrid’s School of Architecture and is currently professor emeritus at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. She is the author of numerous essays on architecture and art criticism, and her most recent publications include Jaulas y Trampas. Escritos sobre arquitectura y arte 2000-2012 (Lampreave, Madrid 2013), Textos críticos (Ediciones Asimétricas, Madrid 2018) and Escritos sobre la invisibilidad (Abada Editores, Madrid 2018).
Emilio Santiago holds a PhD in Anthropology and is a member of the research group Transiciones Socioecológicas (Socio-ecological Transitions) at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). Furthermore, he has taught in the UAM’s Department of Social Anthropology and is a faculty member of the Programme of Independent Studies at MACBA, Barcelona. His work combines political ecology with re-readings of Marxism, and his publications include No es una estafa, es una crisis de civilización (Enclave de libros, 2015), Rutas sin mapa. Horizontes de transición ecosocial (Catarata, 2016) and ¿Qué hacer en caso de incendio? Manifiesto por el Green New Deal (Capitán Swing, 2019).
Julia Spínola is an artist. She has exhibited her work in solo shows (Lubricán, 2018) and collective shows (Querer parecer noche, 2018, and Antes que todo, 2010-2011) at CA2M, and at Kunsthalle São Paulo (Âo túnel-cabo pelo braço, 2015) and Caixaforum Barcelona (Hablo, sabiendo que no se trata de eso, 2015). Furthermore, she has been a fellow of Artes Plásticas Marcelino Botín (2013) and received the Critical Eye in Visual Arts Award from Radio Nacional de España (2013) and the ARCO 2017 Community of Madrid Award. Her work is also part of the Museo Reina Sofía, Marcelino Botín Foundation, Community of Madrid/CA2M, Museo La Panera de Lleida and Montemadrid Foundation/La Casa Encendida collections.
Monday, 28 October 2019 – 5pm
Javier Arnaldo
Tuesday, 5 November 2019 - 5pm
María Teresa Muñoz
Tuesday, 12 November 2019 - 5pm
Emilio Santiago
Tuesday, 19 November 2019 - 5pm
Julia Spínola
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.
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L ’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
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.
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.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.
![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)