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
![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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
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.