-
September 17, 2015 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
66 Exercises in Style, by Colectivo Armadillo
Two actors/homo ludens brimming with dramatic literature and theatrical art history, invaded by voices from every epoch, and locked inside the loop of a trivial stage without resolution.
Setting out from Raymond Queneau’s book Exercises in Style (1947), the piece considers a game of trivial appearances developed in absolute seriousness, a rhetorical pastime, both mannerist and extravagant and not devoid of comedy but also possessing a didactic component that displays its blueprints and intentions. Something that doesn’t materialise into a performance piece but a draft, sketch and project, theatre performed in front of the spectator.
Armadillo is a collective made up of Jesús Barranco, Pilar Campos, Oscar G. Villegas, Raúl Marcos, Luciana Pereyra and Carlos Rod. The collective has developed theatre experiments on the works of Georges Perec (The Raise), Thomas Bernhard (On Earth and in Hell) and Bertolt Brecht (Unfinished Work).66 Exercises in Style is created and performed by: Raúl Marcos/Jesús Barranco. Sound design and lighting: Óscar G. Villegas
-
October 1, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Discussion
In collaboration with: Institut Français
A round-table discussion centred on the OuLiPo group’s. With participation by leading especialists and some of the protagonists of this historic literary experiment.
Paul Fournel, member of the OuLiPo group since 1972, provisional secretary until 2003 and the current chairman. He is the author of an expansive body of literary work that includes Clefs pour la littérature potentielle (Gallimard, 1972), Guignol (Editions du Seuil, 1995) and Les Athlètes dans leur tête (Aldus, ed. Spanish translation, 2009, winner of the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle in 1989).
Pablo Martín Sánchez, writer, author of El anarquista que se llamaba como yo (The Anarchist Whose Name Was Mine, Acantilado, 2012), selected as the best debut novel, and the only Spanish member of OuLiPo.
Pablo Moíño Sánchez, Spanish translator of Georges Perec – The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Spanish translation, La uÑa RoTa, 2009) and Raymond Queneau – The Last Days (Gallo Nero, 2013). He is also author of un verso en una casa enana (A Verse in a Tiny House, La Discreta, 2011).
Carlos Rodríguez, one of the editors of La uÑa RoTa, a publishing house which released Es un oficio de hombres (Autorretrato de hombres y mujeres en reposo) (It’s a Man ’s Profession [A Self-portrait of Idle Men and Women]) and has works by Georges Perec and Samuel Beckett, among others, in its catalogue.
Daniel Montero Galán, illustrator, author of the graphic novel Zooilógico. Bestiario de seres mitoilógicos (Zoo. Bestiary of Mythological Beings, Ediciones Jaguar, 2011) and, together with Juan Mayorga, the illustrated play El elefante ha ocupado la catedral (The Elephant Has Taken Over the Cathedral, Veintisiete letritas, 2012). He also illustrated the cover to the book OuLiPo Es un oficio de hombres (Autorretrato de hombres y mujeres en reposo) (It’s a Man’s Profession [A Self-portrait of Idle Men and Women]), (La uÑa RoTa, 2015).
OuLiPo. 55th Anniversary
Held on 17 Sep, 01 Oct 2015
The Museo marks the 55th anniversary of the OuLiPo group with two activities: The presentation of the work 66 Exercises in Style by Colectivo Armadillo, which is inspired by Queneau’s book Exercises in Style (1947), and a discussion which revolves around the group.
Founded by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, Primer of Potential Literature), emerged in 1960 from a group of mathematicians and writers interested in maximising the possibilities of language through the creation of contraintes. This term is normally translated as constraints or obstacles and alludes to the rules imposed by a literary structure; in the contrainte oulipons find the capacity for language in order to establish unusual connections between words, which allows for unsuspected relationships. From the beginning, OuLiPo would distance itself from literary movements, scientific seminars or literary workshops to build a key chapter that reconsiders the relationships between art and writing, or between language and meaning. Despite taking up previous experience from Dada and Surrealism, it would also displace random exploration and the subconscious with multiplied meaning, projecting and transforming both avant-garde movements from the 1960s onwards. Writers such as Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar and Samuel Beckett and artists like Oyvind Fahlström, Guy de Cointet and Allen Ruppersberg would express how greatly indebted they were to this group with regard to approaches to the creative potential of writing. The Museo Reina Sofía joins in with this acknowledgment via the first theatrical approach to OuLiPo’s inexhaustible present.
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.