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30 April - 27 June, 2014
Course
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30 April, 21 May, 4-5 June, 11 June, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and Protocol Room
Conferences
Access: Free, until full capacity is reached
Gerald Raunig. Revolution as an Expressive Machine
Date: 30 April, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200.
Marcelo Expósito, Tamara Díaz and Nociones Comunes team. Introduction to the exhibition Playgrounds
Date: 21 may, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Alan W. Moore. NYC Art '80s: Space, Permission, Aspiration
Date: 4 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Oliver Ressler. Spatial Occupations
Date: 5 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Adrià Rodríguez and Lilia Weslaty, in conversation. Kairós. Reinventing Democracy in the Mediterranean
Date: 11 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Political Imagination
Held on 30 abr, 07, 14, 21, 28 may, 04, 05, 11, 18, 25 jun 2014
The relationship between art and play has always been interpreted ambiguously. On the one side, via Friedrich Schiller's romantic thought, play entails freedom from ties to reason and the promise of connections with a world distanced from norms and codes. On the other side, it connects with public festivals and carnival, which, as Mijail Bajtin wrote, form a temporary space fenced in by ordered chaos. This ambiguity echoes the English polysemy of "play", between abiding by the rules of the "game" and the intuitive improvisation of "play".
This course and seminar, related to the exhibition Playgrounds (30 April - 22 September), seeks to discuss this contradiction and endeavours to approach periods of twentieth-century art through play as a space for critical intervention from which to try out a new public sphere, proposing other relationships and subjectivities that enable play to be considered as the exercise of creative and political imagination. Thus, it is no coincidence that Courbet's realist stance coincided with and participated in the libertarian utopia of the Paris Commune at the origins of modernity in 1871, that Giacometti's squares echo the atavistic world upheld by the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, or that Guy Debord's cartography transmits the social convulsions of May '68. Equally, the return of protest in the present day appears to confront a new power system that is no longer solely based on show, but rather on participation and relationships. Play elucidates another sociability, spontaneous cities based on affection and care that replace the factory city that characterised the 20th century.
With participation from Gerald Raunig, Luis Navarro, Marcelo Expósito and Paloma Blanco, among others, The Political Imagination combines a series of classes, with free registration, and public conferences. The course is divided into two parts: the first focuses on a historical review that draws on basic references from Avant-garde art; while the second offers a current look at different artistic interventions that have traversed and transformed public space over the past three decades.
Participants
Tamara Díaz. Researcher, curator and coordinator of the Museo Reina Sofía Curatorial Department. Co-curator and coordinator of the exhibition Playgrounds.
Marcelo Expósito. An artist and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Cuenca, and the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA. Member of the Scientific Committee for the exhibition Playgrounds. He has also edited, among other publications: Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Universidad de Salamanca, 2001), Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2008) and Los nuevos productivismos (MACBA/Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2010).
Common Notions. A self-education project that revolves around practical knowledge and skills related to militancy and empowerment. Through different core themes (feminism, post-colonialism, technopolitics, global crisis and metropolis), this series of courses aims to articulate circuits of self-education and critical reflection on the fringes of classic channels of academic and university discussion.
Gerald Raunig. Philosopher, lecturer at the University of Arts, in Zurich, and member of EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) and the editorial board of transversal. He is also the author of Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Semiotext(e), 2007), Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (Traficantes de Sueños, 2008) and Mil máquinas. Breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Traficantes de sueños, 2009).
Oliver Ressler. Artist. His work comprises installations, projects in public spaces and film and video work that approaches themes such as alternative economy, democracy and forms of resistance and social antagonism. He forms part of the exhibition Playgrounds, and has recently exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Basis (Frankfurt), Platform Garanti (Istambul) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin).
Adrià Rodríguez. An audiovisual producer and researcher, he is currently working on the Kairós Project, video-documentary archive on social movements in the Mediterranean. He is also resident researcher in the Museo Reina Sofía in 2013-2014.
Alan W. Moore. Art historian, artist and activist. In 1980 he participated in the creation of ABC No Rio, a collectively run centre for art and activism in New York City. He was also highly involved in the artists’ group Colab and the distribution project MWF Video Club, between 1986-2000. He is author of Art Gangs: Protest & Counterculture in New York City (Autonomedia, 2011) and co-editor of ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery (1985).
![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.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.