Held on 20 Sep 2021
The health crisis affecting the world and the ensuing economic and social disarray has left indelible marks on daily lives, on the bodies of those precariously inhabiting them and on neoliberal capitalism’s circuits of economic and commercial exchanges, which have been abruptly halted and interrupted. The pandemic, precipitating lockdowns leaving individuals isolated and emptying cities, has created a favourable setting for disciplining entire populations and placing them under surveillance, while the most vulnerable side of different existences surviving in total defencelessness owing to a lack of resources and rights has been brought to light during it. The pandemic has also sparked violence which the cruelty of the system of capitalist domination metes out to those subjects deemed useless or surplus. Furthermore, it has spread dread and occasioned elemental fears which, in the global context of frail and flawed democracies, are used by the Right and Far Right to lead their neo-fascist campaigns against those fighting for the emancipation of bodies and minds.
We already know that neoliberalism is not solely an economic doctrine or a series of governance methods, but rather a regime of signs that captures subjectivities in a framework of professional competencies and advertising gratuities promoting the individualism of efficiency and consumerism, breaking all community links in the process. Feminist power and its women’s organisations has imparted knowledge on how to recreate micropolitical ties that range from collective struggles protesting sexual violence to the defence of an ethical solidarity of care.
This international seminar prompts passage from violence and fear to the community of affection (“to be affected by” and “to affect”), drawing on social activism, artistic creation and critical thought to range across sensibility, language, bodies, imagination and politics.
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the
Monday, 20 September 2021
Opening of the Chair
How can subjectivity be liberated from colonial-racialising-capitalistic captivity? Opening lecture by Suely Rolnik (Brazil)
Opposite capitalism’s global seizure of power, in its monetised fold (at once economically neoliberal and culturally neoconservative), movements have been bursting forth, particularly in Latin America, materialising among racialised populations (black, indigenous, women’s, LGBTQI+, casual worker populations, etc.) and in entire cities. These movements extend beyond the history of left-wing resistance, restricting the macropolitical sphere and its target of unequal rights and intervening in the micropolitical sphere, the sphere of the unconscious regime that structures subjectivities and their formation in the social field, which in turn is dependent upon the existential consistency of the dominant system and its production and reproduction. There is no possibility of real change without micropolitical resistance. Within this realm, the margins between activism and artistic and therapeutic practices become indiscernible.
Presentation and conversation: Nelly Richard (Chile/Spain)
Tuesday, 21 September 2021
Table 1. Reshaping Aspects of Sensitivity
The experience of the pandemic laid bare at once the insecurity and fragility of our existence and the need to turn to affection as the key to reciprocity in constructing non-violent subjectivities. “Sensitive” aspects (matter, body, experience) take on relevance when it comes to correcting mean-spirited neoliberal structuring and the value it places solely on utility and profitable data. In which ways can the aesthetic, the political and the ethical be reconjugated in new grammars of desire and imagination, as well as responsibility?
Participan: Gabriel Gatti (Uruguay/Spain), Marina Garcés (Spain) and Luis Ignacio García (Argentina)
Moderated by: Janaina Carrer (Brazil)
Wednesday, 22 September 2021
Table 2. Political Violence and Conflicts of Memory
The management of neoliberal consensus and the levelling of a present cultivated by technocratic rationality both repress exercises of critical memory. However, there are several traumatic entanglements that continue to be projected as ghosts of the present, from a yesterday marked by dictatorial fractures. How can there be a continued exploration of the conflictive magnitude of social historicity that ties together memory but without ceasing, at the same time, to fight against the threat of new violence — economic, social, ethnic, gender-sexual — intersecting today’s political cycles?
Participants: Ileana Diéguez (Cuba/Mexico), Juan Gutiérrez (Spain) and Teresa Villarós (Spain)
Moderated by: José Miguel Neira (Chile)
Thursday, 23 September 2021
Table 3. Trans/feminisms Today: Conquests and Challenges
Feminist power (theory and practice) has been key to deciphering the knots that tether, socio-structurally, capitalism and the patriarchy, vindicating gender as an analytical category. It has also unfurled its collective force, engendering changing forms of intervention: marches, protests, strikes, assemblies, social networks, performances, etc. What are the new challenges the feminist project faces today to expand upon and transversally consolidate its conquests?
Participants: Verónica Gago (Argentina), Clara Serra (Spain) and Elisa Fuenzalida (Peru)
Moderated by: Ybelice Briceño (Venezuela/Ecuador)
Friday, 24 September 2021
Conclusion of the Chair
Baroque Signs. Closing Lecture by Diamela Eltit (Chile)
This lecture examines the expressive turbulence of certain signs stemming from social settings. It centres on the excess (or excesses, in plural) of the representation of the void, and considers the grammar of bodies as mobile forms able to promote local narratives (with a particular focus on Chile). From edges where brightness and opaqueness co-exist, the talk delves into the present time of a world that has become one big hospital, and where the virtual and the material entwine.
Presentation and conversation: Ana Longoni (Argentina)
Curator
Nelly Richard
Programme:
The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Más actividades
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.
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.
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.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.