![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019. Museo Reina](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestina_1.jpg.webp)
Held on 05 Jun 2024
Palestine Is Everywhere is the international slogan of solidarity with the Palestinian people and also the title of a global debate that situates Palestine at the centre of our historical time, understanding the war in Gaza as the start of a new cycle shaped by colonial expansion. Under this title, the Museo organises an encounter that opens with a video recital by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the best-known poetic voices in the Arab language. Following his intervention, artists and theorists Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, part of the Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement, philosopher Marina Garcés and anthropologist Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona will exchange reflections, experiences and viewpoints on the Palestinian situation and cause in a round-table discussion. As a coda to the session, there will be a viewing of Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019), a work by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme which has recently been incorporated into the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation by Mercedes Vilardell in 2024. The eleven-minute video piece sets up a dialogue between the writings of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said (1935–2003) and AI-created images of protests at the wall that runs along the Gaza Strip.
With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau. With their resistance and demands, these territories are crying out for a new world-system that is more just, diverse and equal. What does it mean to be part of the planetary anti-colonial struggle? How to reorient ourselves towards fresh global movements that question the hegemony of the nation state? How to relate images of global freedom, those considered from desire, not pain, in this new temporal framework?
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Cinema as Assembly
Inside the framework of
The Museum of the Commons project is organised by the L’Internationale museum confederation and co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme. L’Internationale comprises fourteen major European art institutions: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), M HKA (Antwerp, Belgium), MSN (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), MSU (Zagreb, Croatia), HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), NCAD (Dublin, Ireland), ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia), IRI (Italy), Tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iași, Romania) and VCRC (Kiev, Ukraine), as well as two associate organisations: IMMA (Dublin, Ireland) and WIELS (Brussels, Belgium).
Participants
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are Palestinian-born artists who live between Ramallah and New York. Through sound, image, text, installation and performance they examine themes such as the intersections between political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. They have shown their work at institutions that include the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2024), MoMA (New York, 2022), the Centraal Museum Utrecht (2021) and the Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and have participated in collective shows such as the Sharjah (2023) and Berlin (2022) biennales and at Appel Amsterdam (2018) and CCA Wattis in San Francisco (2018). Their work At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019) is now part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation made by Mercedes Villaroel in 2024.
Nitasha Dhillon is an artist, teacher and researcher specialised in journalism. With Amin Husain, she is part of the MTL Collective, which joins research, artistic practice and activism. She also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. She is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She is an undergraduate and MA professor in Arts and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and has aligned much of her career towards practical, critical and collective thought that she propels from Espai en Blanc. Her publications most notably include En las prisiones de lo posible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and Escola d’aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).
Amin Husain is an artist, teacher and researcher who specialises in philosophy and political science. Of Palestinian-US origin, he is part of the MTL Collective with Nitasha Dhillon, an initiative that joins research, artistic practice and activism. He also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. He is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a theorist and anthropologist. With interdisciplinary training in economy and anthropology, his work is centred on the relationships between art and political economy. He has conducted far-reaching fieldwork in Italy, the UK, Norway and Brazil, primarily in economic institutions, analysing the relationships between economic development and political identity through participatory and experimental film projects. His practice is situated at the crossroads between pedagogy, art and activism, and he is a co-founder of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet, novelist, teacher and journalist. He was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and was educated in one of the UN Agency’s schools for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Following a long career as a teacher and journalist in Saudi Arabia, he returned to Jordan in 1996 and since then has devoted his work to literature. His prolific output, spanning poetry, prose and essay, is shaped by exile and the Palestinian conflict. Some of his most recent works include Gaza Weddings (Hoopoe, 2017), Prairies of Fever (Interlink Books, 1998) and Time of White Horses (Hoopoe, 2016). He has been honoured with the Award for Best Poetry Collection Published in Jordan and the Arab Literary Award.
![Shuruq Harb. The Jump [El salto], Palestina, 2021. Cortesía de la artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/narrativas_desde_palestina._una_poetica_del_territorio_0.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 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.
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.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.