Held on 19, 20, 21 sep 2022
“Devoting countless hours to learning books by heart seems to contradict every principle governing what we understand by human effort from modernity. Whether it be an artistic or life experience, it seems an obvious and unjustifiable waste of time. It creates nothing new, no new idea that changes or improves the state of things, no new image that helps us to comprehend our problems".
Mette Edvardsen
“Learning by heart is perhaps the best possible reading of a book, by a reader who is moved and captivated, willing to learn the text in such a way that it becomes an integral part of her living organism”.
Victoria Pérez Royo
“Underground Authorships. Text, Body and Life in Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine” in Tropelías. A journal on the Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature (2), 2017
The Museo Reina Sofía continues with its annual welcomes toTime has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.
Time has fallen asleep… focuses on the importance of memory and word of mouth, on producing conditions of encounter between people, on proximity, intimacy and care, by dint of a liking for highly divergent books: novels, essays, poetry, prose. The title comes from a phrase that appears in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which is set in a future society where books are forbidden, causing a community of people to go underground to learn the last existing books with a view to conserving them. Thus, in this activity learning by heart is done as an ongoing practice in time. The project aspires to nothing material — learning a book by heart means to take on a continuous process of recalling and forgetting.
The first encounter was held in 2020 and contributed to the project giving rise to two new “living books” in Spanish and which, along with five titles in English, were made available in in-person and epistolary formats for interested visitors.
In this year’s edition, the reading-transmission of the two books in Spanish can be requested or one of the five books in English, all outlined in the list below, can be received by mail. A total of seven living books makes up the catalogue of this third instalment.
Desde su inicio en 2010, Time has fallen asleep… se ha presentado en más de cincuenta librerías y bibliotecas de distintas ciudades, con un creciente número de libros vivos que forman una biblioteca que cuenta en este momento con más de ochenta títulos en inglés, francés, árabe, neerlandés, noruego, griego, alemán, polaco, estonio, sueco, danés y groenlandés.
Since its inception in 2010, Time has fallen asleep… has been presented in over fifty book shops and libraries in different cities, with a growing number of living books that form a library currently holding more than eighty titles in English, French, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, German, Polish, Estonian, Swedish, Danish, and Greenlandic.
Mette Edvardsen works in the sphere of stage arts and performance, in addition to her explorations in other mediums and formats such as video and the publishing and experimental composition of books. Due to her training as a dancer and participation in choreographic projects and prestigious companies like les ballets C de la B and Mårten Spångberg, her work is often framed inside the field of dance. Perhaps it is the place from which she investigates modes of generating practices and situations, although her work does break out beyond such disciplinary limits, delving into hard-to-classify terrains, with an interest in the relationship between language and action running through the centre of her work. Edvardsen is currently a researcher at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and an associated artist at the Black Box theatre in the same city. She is also a founder, with Juan Domínguez, Alma Söderberg and Sarah Vanhee, of the collaborative platform Manyone.
Living books available
In oral format:
- Amuleto (1999), by Roberto Bolaño
By mail:
- The Little Prince (1943), by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-
- In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (1985), by Bernard-Marie Koltès
- Monkey (1942), by Arthur Walley, a translated and abbreviated version of Journey to the West
(s. XVI), attributed to Wu Ch’êng-ên
- Your silence will not protect you (2017), by Audre Lorde
- Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
Credits
Concept:Mette EdvardsenParticipants:Simon Asencio, Mette Edvardsen, Violeta Gil, Siriol Joyner, Sarah Ludi, Irena Radmanovic, and Andrea RodrigoProduction:Mette Edvardsen / Athome & ManyoneCo-production:Dubbelspel - STUK Kunstencentrum & 30CC (Leuven), Dance Umbrella (London), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), NEXT Arts Festival (Valenciennes, Lille, Kortrijk, Villeneuve d'Ascq), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), osloBIENNALEN First edition 2019–2024 (Oslo), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), 34ª Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo), Centre dramatique national de Normandie (CDN, Caen) and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (París)Support:Arts Council Norway / Norsk Kulturråd
![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
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.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.