Held on 16 nov 2012
Each week, during the months of November and December, projections and project presentations by researchers, artists and cultural producers will be held. How do these creators approach and activate collaborative processes in their audiovisual productions? How much of a political and social transformation dimension do such processes have?
In collaboration with
Instituto Francés-Embajada Francesa de Madrid, Goethe Institut de Madrid and Casa de Velázquez – Académie de France de Madrid
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Vicedecanato de Extensión Universitaria of Facultad de Bellas Artes at UCM and Subtramas Research Group (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní, Virginia Villaplana)
In collaboration with
Presentation of the research with Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní, and Virginia Villaplana, Research Group Subtramas. Collaborative audiovisual production practices.
Presentation of the project with Sara Fuentes and Rosalía Jordán, researchers at the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre.
Collaboration project that explores the relevance of feelings and emotions in the daily life of vulnerable and precarious bodies that experience discrimination based on gender, class, functionality, race, and/or sexuality in the Lavapiés neighbourhood (Madrid). The presentation will include the activation of the audiovisual mechanisms generated: map and video essay by Marta Huertas and Lydia Fernández.
Berwick Street Film Collective, 90', United Kingdom, 1972-75, B/W, original language with Spanish subtitles.
A collective film set during the unionisation campaign of nightshift cleaners in London, who were victims of wage precarisation. This film is recognised as a key work of experimental political cinema in the 1970s in the United Kingdom.
Presentation of the collective with Christian Lehman, María Otero, and Paolo Pistolesi.
The audiovisual commission of Madrid's 15M movement has been producing audiovisual information about the actions of the movement since May 2011 and the alternative critical narratives of the current economic crisis, as well as producing documentaries and films using collaborative and collective methodologies.
http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/tv/
Children of Srikandi Collective, 74’, Indonesia-Germany, 2012, colour, original language with Spanish subtitles.
The first documentary about queer identity in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. The participants worked collectively, using personal experiences ranging from observational documentary to conceptual art or biographical essay, to explore queer politics, violence, social exclusion, religious beliefs, and sexual identity.
www.childrenofsrikandi.com/film/
+1: On the personal and the political, Odile Magniez, 2012, 6'. Original language with Spanish subtitles.
+42: Indignant Feminists, Irene Bailo, 2012, 5'30. Original language with French subtitles.
-66: The signs of power, Jesús Acevedo, 2012, 2'20.
+7: Life and death of a group in a video game, Damien Dedieu, 2012, 5'30. Original language with Spanish subtitles.
+33: Plato's Cave and the City-Image, Benoît Perraud, 2012, 6'. Original language with Spanish subtitles.
+44: Participatory council, Carmen Comadrán, 2012, 5'45. Original language with French subtitles.
+46: Colonial anthropology, Pilar Monsell, 2012, 5'41. Original language with French subtitles.
+89: Persecuted and hidden, Sylvain George, 2012, 6'20. Original language with Spanish subtitles.
100jours is an ephemeral collective and an online project formed by 100 short films directed by visual artists from different countries. Shown during the 100 days leading up to the second round of the French presidential elections in 2012, one film per day, these works aim to understand the history of our relationships as the foundation of the political and imagine what lies ahead.
www.100jours2012.org/
Claire Glorieux, 2011, 16’. Presentation by Xabier Baudoin, director of art studies at Casa de Velázquez - Académie de France in Madrid.
In one of the Canary Islands, a whistling language is used, which was previously employed to communicate with those who are far away, before the advent of roads or mobile phones. The filmmaker went there to learn the language by attending whistling classes in schools.
Presentation of the project with the Catenaria Collective, formed by researchers from the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre. The collective promotes a debate on issues related to collaboration, aiming to highlight and disrupt the mechanisms that establish conduct criteria in museums.
Presentation of the project with students from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Murcia and Pedro Ortuño, artist and professor at the same institution.
This collaborative audiovisual project was developed as part of the Interventions in Urban and Natural Spaces class. It focuses on the La Paz working-class neighbourhood in Murcia, known for its cultural diversity and controversial nature. The city council has had plans for urban remodelling for years, which would alter the neighbourhood's identity.
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
![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)