Performance by the Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx company. Photo: Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx
For the first time, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Óprima!, an annual encounter which, since 2022, has gathered collectives, associations and creatives with an interest in uniting theatre and activism to drive social transformation via Theatre of the Oppressed: a practice, created by Brazilian dramatist and educator Augusto Boal in the 1960s, which puts forward “a theatre of oppressed classes for the oppressed” as a tool to fight against oppressive structures.
In previous years, the encounter has been carried out in cities such as Lisbon, Braga, Porto and Setúbal, among others. Propelled by the Centro de Creación e Investigación Cultural (the Centre for Cultural Creation and Research, CCIC) La Tortuga and Museo Situado, the encounter disembarks in Madrid to keep on reflecting on Theatre of the Oppressed and to share resources that contribute to the social struggles in which the participants are involved.
Check the full programme here to see the activities held in the sites of CCIC La Tortuga and Ateneo La Maliciosa.
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Agenda
viernes 01 nov 2024 a las 10:00
Workshop. Street Theatre
Conducted by the Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx company, this two-day theoretical and practical activity seeks to explore creative processes in groups by way of stage exercises linking the discourse of ritual action to the mission of creating collective reflections on urgent issues. Led by Ximena Cañas Abell (director and dramatist) and Lucía Valenzuela Chacaltana (integrated design), the activity revises street performance techniques and the relations they bear to feminisms.
sábado 02 nov 2024 a las 10:30
Workshop. Street Theatre
Conducted by the Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx company, this two-day theoretical and practical activity seeks to explore creative processes in groups by way of stage exercises linking the discourse of ritual action to the mission of creating collective reflections on urgent issues. Led by Ximena Cañas Abell (director and dramatist) and Lucía Valenzuela Chacaltana (integrated design), the activity revises street performance techniques and the relations they bear to feminisms.
viernes 01 nov 2024 a las 18:00
Augusto Boal and Forming Theatre of the Oppressed. Discussion
Where do the techniques and methods systemised by Augusto Boal stem from in the poetics of Theatre of the Oppressed? Setting out from an investigation by Geo Britto, this discussion analyses Boal’s developmental actions and their influence on the formation, construction and systemisation of Theatre of the Oppressed, as well as their relationship to the turbulent world of his time.
viernes 01 nov 2024 a las 19:30
Of Mud, Flowers and Struggle, by Las Teatrekas
Created from the accounts of women who make up the Las Teatrekas group, and their mothers and grandmothers, this documentary theatre piece is a journey through the history of Vallecas — a homage to all those female residents who built a better neighbourhood for everyone.
sábado 02 nov 2024 a las 15:00
Restoring the Question. Joker Laboratory (Forum Theatre)
Throughout history, theatre has been used as a form of expression and protest against oppression, injustice and social inequalities. Via a re-reading of the third scene of the work The Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938) by Bertolt Brecht — which participants must read beforehand — the workshop seeks to revise it from the perspective of Theatre of the Oppressed and create a model of forum theatre, revamping the mechanisms of totalitarian oppression presented in the piece. It also addresses how to conceive of the role of the joker in a possible forum with closed groups, in which fake news has seeped through and hate speech has become legitimised.
This workshop continues on 3 November 2024 at 10:30am in Ateneo La Maliciosa.
sábado 02 nov 2024 a las 18:00
Care All Day, by Laboratório Teatro & Política
A stage performance on the difficulties faced by those who have to care for an ill mother. In a system in which only the family is responsible for caring for their own, this forum theatre piece deals with issues such as the slowness of social responses and bureaucracy in the Estatuto do Cuidador Informal (Statute of Informal Carers), a law enacted in 2019 in Portugal to regulate the rights and duties of carers and the person cared for.
sábado 02 nov 2024 a las 19:30
Without Us Women the World Stops, by Territorio Doméstico
Actuación teatral del colectivo Territorio Doméstico que recoge parte de los cantos, consignas y performances que han creado a lo largo de su historia como activistas A theatrical performance by the Territorio Doméstico collective which gathers the songs, slogans and performances they have created throughout their time as activists working for the rights of domestic workers and carers. A stage piece which drives home their struggles for the dignity and visibility of these works as a key part of sustaining life.los derechos de las trabajadoras del hogar y de los cuidados. Una propuesta escénica que reivindica sus luchas por la dignificación y visibilización de estos trabajos como parte fundamental del sostenimiento de la vida.
Participants
Geo Britto is a founding and coordinating member of Escola de Teatro Popular (ETP) in Rio de Janeiro. He has focused on Theatre of the Oppressed for more than thirty-four years, twenty of which were shared with Augusto Boal. He recently published Augusto Boal e a formação do Teatro do Oprimido (Morula Editorial, 2024).
Jordi Forcadas is a performance artist whose work is situated in social action through art and forum theatre, a Theatre of the Oppressed technique which enables him to explore different forms of citizen participation and to demand human rights. He is the co-founder of Forn de teatre Pa'tothom in Barcelona, where he develops projects with communities in correctional facilities, schools, youth centres, women’s groups and migrant people. He is the author of the book Praxis de Teatro del Oprimido (Forn de Teatre Pa´tothom, 2017).
Las Teatrekas is a theatre group made up of eighteen women of different ages, ranging from 40 to 75. The group began to gestate in November 2015 and was run by two women from the Alto del Arenal Neighbourhood Association, in the Madrid neighbourhood of Vallecas, with the aim of generating a space of encounter that uses theatre as a social tool.
Laboratório de Teatro & Política is an initiative that came into being in 2021, stemming from projects developed by the Tartaruga Falante Association in Portugal. It operates as a space of collective creation and experimentation based on methodologies from Theatre of the Oppressed, dialectic theatre, the army of clowns, agitprop and performance. The initiative fosters debate from the intersection between art and political intervention and approaches issues such as LGBTIQA+ discrimination, the right to housing and informal care.
Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx is a theatre company characterised by its exploration of stage action in public spaces from a feminist angle. From the multidisciplinary, they set forth performances in non-conventional spaces, action art and community art.
Territorio Doméstico is a collective which fosters a space of encounter, care, empowerment and women’s struggles — predominantly migrant women — for the recognition of their rights as domestic and care workers. Founded in 2006, the group works to demand dignity and worth for their work within a system that makes them invisible and precarious, despite them being essential. In 2019, they released the album Sin nosotras se para el mundo (Without Us Women the World Stops), which brings together the songs they have taken to the streets to joyfully vindicate their struggles. Territorio Doméstico is also a member of Museo Situado.
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
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.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.