Held on 12 Jun 2021
At a time when our reality is a climate and health emergency, the void left by the sense of collectiveness, the devaluation of communal living, cutbacks to public services and the ever-present privatisation of life, Grigri Projects and SERCADE (with its project Programme Afrique) put forward, in line with Museo Situado’s manifesto Facing a Clamour that Cannot Be Ignored: The Ethics of Catastrophe, a common space from which to collectively think about community living in the city of Madrid. The project is supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.
As a medicine cabinet well stocked with first aid material, the project looks to delve deeper into the conception of care with the help of ideas and useful resources to identify what is good for us collectively and to open pathways that allow us to live differently. All of this is mutually understood with the knowledge, particularly migrant knowledge, and experiences of people who inhabit this collectiveness in the search for a multicultural community neighbourhood with shared future perspectives.
The programme A Medicine Cabinet for My City is made up of six workshops and two bespoke guided tours to be carried out in spaces inside the Museo Reina Sofía, SERCADE, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Medialab Prado from 6 May to 12 June, culminating in an open session for the general public.
The sessions are organised around three hubs, from which a commons map is articulated. The first focuses on the places in which participants feel at home (and feel uncomfortable), as well as people who, through care, have determined their lives. The second axis is related to the currents established from the paths that make up their daily lives in the city, involving accessible and inaccessible places, with an outline of each circumstance. The third and final hub alludes to times in which certain spaces and people provide, via different ties, a sense of belonging. This themed tour is enhanced by Yannick Tresor Dzouko Komgang, an intercultural mediator, volunteer and interpreter at SERCADE, Adam Hassane Saleh, a contributor with Grigri Pixel, and the Grigri Projects residencies programme, workshops and seminars, and Susana Moliner and David Pérez, both part of the Grigri Projects team.
The final session in the programme, open to the general public and held in the Museo Reina Sofía, displays the results to come out of previous encounters, offering a “first-aid kit” framed inside a conversation between philosopher Marina Garcés and theologist and activist Pepa Torres. Furthermore, the event is part of the activities organised around the Museo Reina Sofía’s Neighbourhood Picnic.
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She is a degree and MA lecturer in Art and Humanities Studies at the Open University of Catalonia, and has steered her career towards the practical, critical and collective thought she develops from Espai en Blanc. Her publications most notably include En las prisiones de lo posible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and Escola d'aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).
Grigri projects is a platform centred around research, creation and cultural production, acting in participatory design, urban intervention and transdisciplinary community processes, in collaboration with other local and international collectives and agents.
SERCADE. The Capuchin Service for Development and Solidarity is a non-profit association that has channelled social action developed by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin since 1998. Its social work is deployed in programmes with vulnerable collectives, projects of collaboration and cooperation among other organisations from national and international spheres, denouncement actions in the media and on social networks, and in initiatives to advocate an appreciation of disadvantaged collectives.
Pepa Torres is a philologist, social educator and a resident in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, where she is an activist with collectives of migrant and feminist struggles: Red Interlavapiés, Senda de cuidados and Territorio Doméstico.
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International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.