Held on 28 Jan 2021
Night of Ideas is an annual event propelled since 2016 by the Institut français in Paris and occasions a reflection on the major challenges of our times. The sixth edition of the event in 2021 is held under the title Proches (Close) and sets out to rethink the relations between living beings and new forms of solidarity. As a result, the Institut français in Madrid and Museo Reina Sofía have organised a programme which unfurls in different formats and lays out different approaches, from philosophical thought to artistic practice and collective endeavours.
In Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018), revisited in his lecture in the Museo Reina Sofía, the philosopher suggests that if it is from plants that we ought to enquire what the world is, this is because it is they who “make the world”. In a presentation around “making place”, Alejandra Riera advocates reconsidering, more mindfully, the relations between human and non-human beings, as sets that are linked, composed, at odds and in dialogue; the result of mixing. “To notice”, writes the artist, “the existence of this place, in this seesaw of exchanges between things-beings-worlds, feels poetically urgent. Incidentally, ‘mixture’, Coccia reminds us, is the common name for what we call, in its proper name, World”. The programme also includes a workshop run by the Torta Collective, a public debate moderated by María González Reyes and a performance by artist Itziar Okariz.
Programme
Retiro Park, Palacio de Cristal, and Sabatini Building, Garden
Activity canceled due to temporary closure of the Retiro Park
4:30pm Entering Through the Window. A New Drift for Travelling Through a Museum, a workshop led by the Torta Collective.
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In the Museo some spaces and doors are open to insects, birds, fungi, yeasts and algae, yet they all pass through cautiously and with trepidation; although they are all invited, we rarely see them. In this workshop, run by the Torta Collective, a walk is put forward through which to build devices to welcome these “beings that protect other beings” who have exited museums swiftly, no longer daring to enter. To enter through the window.
Starting in the Palacio de Cristal, which has opened its windows to allow birds and insects in as part of Petrit Halilaj’s exhibition To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love, the expedition includes the making of a house of insects in the Retiro Park and the exploration of the so-called “garden of mixtures” in the Sabatini Building, to finally leave out the back of the Museo, via Calle Hospital. Therefore, the workshop is an incursion with which to create an experience and, like barely visible insects, to leave an almost imperceptible trace.
*Attending the workshop with a flask or small bottle of water is recommended.
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Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
6:00pm Making Room. (Inherent) Possible Transformations, presented by Alejandra Riera.
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In the words of Riera: “This proposal involves jointly addressing a reflection around making, inventing places, making place, making room, reconsidering, with greater focus, the relations between human-non-human beings, as sets that are linked, composed, at odds and in dialogue; approaching the question of the ‘here’ in which we find ourselves, as a carrier of narratives and different forms of being. Taking into account life and the uses of places, their forms and potential transformations, and remembering that the point of view is in the body, we will attempt to reflect on what we produce and sketch out differences and places of convergence between landscape, place and environment. Thus, perhaps we can try to imagine how to make place, make place-walkways collectively.
In view of where we find ourselves, where we are going, we always make place and the idea is that ‘encounter has a place’ and that this place is necessary for the encounter to
be as open as possible. Ultimately, there are enough of us interested and ready to re-enliven places in which our lives don’t do anything, when all is said and done, more than pass by, but which we also inhabit in the present. Singularly and collectively, through yet-to-be-found gestures, will we manage to transform issues of so-called ‘ecological transition’ in an issue that has always affected relations, the forms of relation or separation with a still sensitive world around us?
The world of sensibility, that which touches us and through which, like plants — those beings of such eloquent mutism and diversity — we learn that, occasionally, ‘there is no greater proximity than assuming the distance of the other’, as anti-concentration camp psychiatrist Jean Oury said upon describing his mode of relating to people whose form of acting and whose language are hard to comprehend, the mad, but with whom he had decided to closely forge his path.
Emanuele Coccia acknowledges that plants are the only things that, through photosynthesis, do not need to feed off other living beings to survive, while all other organisms live exclusively by incorporating the lives of others. Coccia does not tell us what we must do or no longer do, what we must think of and about beings. More accurately, his ethics seems related to not enclosing, neither closing nor establishing closed categories, nor favouring nor exercising condescendence, which is so widespread, but rather inviting ourselves to doubt any account (both of origin and evolution) that does not recognise the ‘mix’ that exists in us. A mix with no fusion. Not a summation or juxtaposition, not a total integration-fusion, but a mix that already takes place within us. Understanding the existence of this place, this seesaw of exchanges between things-beings-worlds feels poetically urgent. Incidentally, ‘mixture’, Coccia reminds us, is the common name for what we call, in its proper name, World”.
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7:00pm The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture, a lecture by Emanuele Coccia.
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“We barely talk about them and their names escape us. Philosophy has customarily relegated them; even biology considers them as a simple decoration on the tree of life. Yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us; they are the origin of breath that animates us. Plants embody the closest and most elemental link that life can establish with the world. Under the sky and clouds, mixing with water and wind, their existence is a never-ending cosmic contemplation. The Life of Plants is situated from the point of view of plants — leaves, roots, flowers — to understand the world not as a universal space that contains everything, but as the general atmosphere, the climate, a place of true metaphysical mixture,” Emanuele Coccia writes.
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7:45pm Public debate, moderated by María González Reyes
8:15pm The Ocean Breath, performance by Itziar Okariz, in a collaboration with Izar Ocariz, presented by Isabel de Naverán.
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This work is built from a chorus of breathing. Ujjayi is a breathing technique used in yoga, whereby the artist is the instructor. The word ujjayi means “one who is victorious” and is normally translated as “the ocean breath” because it is the image it evokes. The piece is figurative in nature, between the abstract space of the sound of breathing and the image that generates, as though sign and meaning were separate, fractures.
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Organised by
Institut français and Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and associate professor (maître de conférences) at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris (EHESS). He also holds a PhD in Medieval Philosophy from the University of Florence and has served as adjunct professor in the History of Philosophy at the Alberts Ludwig University of Frieburg, in Freiburg im Breisgau, and Art History at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris. His books, translated into various languages, include Filosofía de la Imaginación. Averroes y el averroísmo (Adriana Hidalgo, 2007), Sensible Life (Fordham University Press, 2016), El bien en las cosas. La publicidad como discurso moral (Shangrila Textos Aparte, 2015), The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018) and Métamorphoses (Payot & Rivage, 2020).
María González Reyes is a professor of Biology in Secondary Education and an activist with Ecologists in Action, where she participates in the sphere of environmental education and eco-feminism. She is the author of numerous books of short stories and co-author of Cambio climático (Litera, 2019), among others. She has written numerous articles related to social environmentalism and contributed to different publications, for instance El Salto, Revista Papeles, Cuadernos de Pedagogía, Graó, La Marea, Revista Ecologista and Pikara Magazine.
Isabel de Naverán conducts research at the crossroads between art, contemporary choreography and performance in projects of curatorship, publishing and writing. She holds a PhD in Art from University of the Basque Country and is part of the research group Artea. In 2010, she founded, with Leire Vergara, Miren Jaio and Beatriz Cavia, Bulegoa z/b - Oficina de arte y conocimiento in Bilbao, a project she was connected to until 2018. Since 2017 she has been in charge of curating live arts (dance-performance) in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Itziar Okariz works in the sphere of action and performance, questioning ways of regulating language and the production of signs that define us. Her most recent projects include her participation in Las estatuas (Museo Jorge Oteiza Foundation, Alzuza, 2020), 13th Shangai Biennale (2020), Perforated by (for the Spanish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, with Sergio Prego, 2019), I Never Said Umbrella (Tabakalera, San Sebastián, 2018), Una construcción, es decir, una jerarquía de momentos, expresiva de cierto concepto grande o pequeño, abstracto esotérico (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018), Itziar Okariz (Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, 2017) and Dream Diary (Ars Parcours, Basel, 2017). Izar Ocariz likes to read, write, draw and do karate. Both live in Bilbao.
Alejandra Riera, born in Buenos Aires, has lived and worked in France for thirty years, where she is a professor of Documentary and Transversal Practices and Poetics at the National School of Art Cergy-Paris, and previously taught Film and Documentary Practices at the National School of Art Bourges over an eleven-year period. She upholds a sustained and focused practice on plants and the practice of writing and photography and film (films-documents). Her endeavours and research set forth questions that surface between images and texts as they drive forward the realisation of situated poetics of gestures that join diverse forms of knowledge, knowledge that interrogates the ways we read history and geography.
Her efforts have often fuelled thinking, gestures and collective writings, while her research and plastic and filmic endeavours have been presented on numerous occasions inside and outside of spaces devoted solely to disseminating art and film productions. Since 2017, she has prepared and made a place for, in a collective endeavour, the Garden of Mixtures in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Torta is a collective, made up of Tom Cano and Marta Pérez, which puts forward organic modes of production with the aim of placing value on the links between nature and sustainability, fostering a distancing from neoliberal formulas of competitiveness and efficiency and taking up art and food as research tools. The Collective’s practice is defined as a mode of weaving ties and discourses that help to understand present-day conflicts. During the 2019/2020 academic year, Torta have designed and accompanied the programme of equipo1821 in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Más actividades
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The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
27, 28, 29 ABR 2026
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.