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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
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
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.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.