Ceija Stojka. Untitle, 1995. Acrylic on cardboard, 69,5 x 99 cm. Antoine de Galbert Collection, Paris. © Ceija Stojka, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019. Photography: © Célia Pernot
Held on 22 nov 2019
Inside the framework of the exhibition Ceija Stojka. This Has Happened, (Museo Reina Sofía, 22 November 2019 – 23 March 2020), this encounter reflects upon the relationship between art and memory in relation to the Romani genocide (porrajmos in Romani) during the Second World War. The session will comprise a round-table discussion between film-maker and writer Karin Berger, anthropologist David Berna and artist and researcher María García Ruiz; the screening of Canta gitano (1981) by French-Algerian film-maker Tony Gatlif, of Romani descent; and a concert performed by the gypsy association Mujeres con Propósito (Women with Purpose), from Madrid’s Embajadores neighbourhood.
The different gypsy ethnicities in Europe have endured a long history of persecution and discrimination since they first settled in the continent in the 15th century. However, the genocide planned by Nazi Germany is, without question, the worst example of the systematic extermination of the Romani people on European soil. Known as the porrajmos, this event in history is overshadowed somewhat by other tragic events from the same period, such as the Holocaust, and, even today, despite the loss of between 255,000 and 500,000 human lives, it is not remembered, either socially or politically, the way it should be. Behind it are numerous issues associated with the place of the gypsy community in today’s European nations, namely: their exclusion from official records and their transnational, nomadic past; in short, the stereotyped imagery of otherness, misunderstood as something intrinsic yet caused by sustained structural discrimination. The reasons stated above mean the surviving memories of the porrajmos do not possess the same recognition as survivors of the Shoah, and are less monumental in scope and yet to be fictionalised in popular culture or with any form of poetic and autobiographical expression that differs from the simple narration of facts.
In this respect, personal writing — such as diaries — visual arts, and performance arts form all-important manifestos to express the significance of the porrajmos. One such example is the artist Ceija Stojka (Kraubath, Austria, 1933 – Vienna, Austria, 2013), a gypsy from the Lovara community who survived the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration and extermination camps, together with just five members of a 200-member extended family.
Stojka rendered an account of this traumatic experience four decades later through writing, painting and drawing in what was an intense exercise of remembrance. Breaking the silence she had kept for so many years on the persecution that she personally and the gypsy people collectively suffered was not only of huge symbolic significance; it also fostered the associationism of the Romani community and the vindication of reparation policies in her country. Therefore, upon her death in 2013, she was recognised as one of the most emphatic European voices against discrimination and historical amnesia, and this activity analyses her story and the work of other Sinti and Romani gypsies who drew on the visual arts, film and music to narrate the porrajmos.
With the support of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Karin Berger is a film-maker and writer. In her work she explores women’s historical struggles against National Socialism, whilst challenging stereotypes in representations of the Romani people. She has directed two documentaries on the artist Ceija Stojka: Ceija Stojka. Porträt einer Romní (Ceija Stojka. Portrait of a Romani Woman, 1999) and Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras (The Green Green Grass Beneath, 2005), and has edited three of the artist’s autobiographies: Wir leben im Verborgenen (We Live in Seclusion, Picus Verlag, 1988), Reisende auf dieser Welt (Travellers on this World, Picus Verlag, 1992) and Träume ich, dass ich lebe? (Am I Dreaming That I Am Alive?, Picus Verlag, 2015).
David Berna is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). A specialist in gypsy studies, he has published a broad number of essays on sexual identity and the gypsy community, for example “Cartografías desde los márgenes. Gitanos gays en el Estado español” (Cartographies from the margins. Gay gypsies in the Spanish State), in Lucas R. Platero (ed.)., Intersecciones: cuerpos y sexualidades en la encrucijada (Bellaterra, 2012), and “Un golpe de estado y dos billetes de autobús. Mujeres gitanas, sexo y amor en la dictadura” (One coup d’état and two bus tickets. Gypsy women, sex and love in the dictatorship), in Raquel Osborne (ed.)., Mujeres bajo sospecha. Memoria y sexualidad 1930-1980 (Fundamentos, 2012).
María García Ruiz is a visual artist and researcher. She has a degree in Architecture and is currently working on her PhD in Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the ways of inhabiting that characterised gypsy nomadism at the turn of the 20th century and are related to avant-garde art and architecture. Moreover, she curated, with Pedro G. Romero, Máquinas de vivir. Flamenco y arquitectura en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios (Machines for Living. Flamenco and Architecture in the Occupation and Vacating of Spaces, CentroCentro, Madrid, 2017–2018).
Mujeres con Propósito is a group made up of gypsy women who are residents in Madrid’s Embajadores neighbourhood and who, over the past ten years, have gathered to share and learn. As a collective they have undertaken forms of art and music, participating in different social projects in the neighbourhood.
6pm
Andalusian gypsy singing with Mujeres con Propósito
6:16pm
Round-table discussion with Karin Berger, David Berna and María García Ruiz
7:30pm
Screening of Tony Gatlif’s Canta gitano
France, 1981, colour, sound, digital archive, 14’
7:45pm Andalusian gypsy singing with Mujeres con Propósito in the rooms of the exhibition Ceija Stojka. This Has Happened
![Ceija Stojka. Gefangennahme und Abtransport [Arrest and Deportation], 1995. Acrylic on cardboard, 70 x 100 cm. Wien Museum, Vienna. © Ceija Stojka, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019. Photography: © Wien Museum / Birgit and Peter Kainz](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/cejia2g.gif.webp)
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
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.
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.
![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)