-
Wednesday, 20 and Tuesday, 26 March – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Centre, Space D
Incomplete Times. Chile, First Laboratory of Neoliberalism
Exhibition opening, and guided tour led by Nelly Richard
Wednesday, 20 March – 7pm
Opening
Admission: free, until full capacity is reachedTuesday, 26 March – 7pm
Guided tour
Admission: free, with prior registration required by filling out the following form
Capacity: 20 placesThe 1973 coup d’état in Chile signalled the break-up of the historical narrative of the Popular Unity alliance and the establishment of a 17-year dictatorship ruled by Augusto Pinochet. The consolidation of such a dictatorship combined state terrorism with the economic ‘shock doctrine’ implemented by the Chicago Boys to turn the country into the first laboratory of neoliberalism on a global scale.
Artists and activists retrieve iconic images from that traumatic event in an overlapping of time – past, present, future – that shook the fabric of neoliberalism in Chile. Thus, the strata of social memory are upheld in a continued variation, enabling the axes of historical temporality (retrospection and prefiguration) to swing surprisingly in unexpected directions.
-
Monday, 25 and Tuesday, 26 March – 11am / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory
Seminar conducted by Nelly Richard
Admission: free, with prior registration by filling out the following form
Capacity: 35 placesThe seminar Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory looks between certain folds of Chile’s social historicity which mark the passage from dictatorship to transition by way of the relationship between art and critical thought. Therefore, creative strategies facilitating experimental artistic practices are explored, venturing, firstly, to bend the authoritarian/repressive framing of the dictatorship, before activating dissent (conflicts of memory, identity and gender) in the falsely inclusive landscape of political and social consensus and the market which unfolded during the transition.
-
Wednesday, 27 March – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Bodies and Memories from the Transition in Latin and America and Spain: Feminist Re-Readings
Round-table discussion with Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and María Rosón
Admission: free, until full capacity is reached
Feminisms put forward a critical narrative of the bodies that crossed the threshold between dictatorship and post-dictatorship, from the disputes between morality and sexuality, the conflicts of representation and public visibility in the symbol of the ‘woman’, and the performative force of some of their mise en scènes.
The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
A Survey of Transitions in Latin America and Spain
Held on 24 mar 2019
The line of force The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory, coordinated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, brings into focus different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. The programme’s point of departure is the conception of memory, not as a fixed gaze on a concluded past but as an agent to decipher and re-read fragments and settings, procedures and narratives, rhetoric and politics of the body and image that continue to question the present with their force of performance. To survey these past/present materials entails strengthening multiple senses, in friction at the crossroads between art, subjectivity, social discourse, culture and institutions.
On this occasion, the programme shines a light on cases in Spain and the Southern Cone of South America, starting, firstly, with the unveiling of the exhibition Incomplete Times. Chile, the First Neoliberal Laboratory, in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre (from 21 March to 24 May 2019), and the guided tour by its curator, Nelly Richard. The show brings together different artistic and activist practices which explore the economic ‘shock doctrine’, developed by the Chicago Boys to turn Chile into the first global neoliberal laboratory under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Secondly, the seminar Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory, conducted by Nelly Richard, seeks to look between certain folds in Chile’s social historicity which mark the passage from dictatorship to transition, considering the relationship between art and critical thought.
The programme concludes with the round-table discussion Bodies and Memories of the Transition in Latin America and Spain: Feminist Re-Readings, featuring the participation of Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and Clara Serra. Together, through feminist narratives, they analyse conditions of transition in Spain, Chile and Argentina, vying for the subjective footprints that make up identity, sexuality and gender, and the emergence – past and present – of women as a collective subject of political articulation and social transformation to be vectors of commotion in the unstable and essential exercise of these historical re-writings.
Inside the framework of the line of force
The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Study Centre
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
![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 - 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.