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From 18 to 20 May
Workshop conducted by Mattin
Free registration, open until 13 May
Please send your CV and a cover letter to artesenvivo2@museoreinasofia.es
List of accepted aplicants
Intended for people interested in contemporary art, performance and sound practices, the workshop sets out from the historical resonance of the Sala de Bóvedas, located in the basement of the Museo, which underscores the qualities of voice in relation to insanity.
Mattin’s sound, performance and theoretical production focuses on different political aspects of noise and improvisation, his work encompasses noise records and concepts and deals of identity on the voice, as well as collaborations with other improvisation artists and groups like Sakada, La Grieta and Billy Bao. In many of his projects the idea of musical performance is destroyed or social and hierarchical organisation becomes apparent. -
20 May, 2015 Sabatini Building, Sala de Bóvedas. Floor -1
Mattin, in collaboration with Maite Barreras, Susana Carmona, Rubén Coll, Fátima Cue, Julie Mathieu, Julián Mayorga, Jorge Ocasio Colón and Marta Sainz. Collective Performance for Voices and Vaults
This collective intervention looks to appropriate the subjectivities and temporalities that comprise the historical resonance of the Sabatini Building. Devised in the workshop calling for proposals and performed by the same participants, it will take place in the Sala de Bóvedas, one of the oldest spaces in the building which, until the closure of the General Hospital in 1963, housed hydrotherapy facilities and rooms for patients with dementia.
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27 May, 2015 Sabatini Building, east and west stairs
Jean-Luc Guionnet y Artur Vidal. Two Simultaneous Concerts for Two Staircases. Babbling and Glossolalias
The concert featuring these two saxophonists is held simultaneously in two symmetrical staircases, separated by some two hundred metres – despite the fact that nowadays they are cut off, in the past they were an essential part of the building in its years as a hospital. The intervention stems from the interaction of the wind instrument with the granite, enormous staircase and the setting it occurs in.
This is the first time both world-renowned saxophonists have worked together, although they will be performing in different places and hearing them at the same time will be impossible. The simultaneity of the intervention looks to break away from the duo structure in which the performers communicate by seeing and listening to one another, and looks to rethink the arrangement of a standard programme, where one musician follows the other in time.
Both musicians have worked with the potential of the instrument and the circumstances that arise in live performance. Artur Vidal’s work interacts with the specific site and the space it circulates around, while the music of Jean-Luc Guionnet relates external elements and the instrument used to a question or theoretical principle, for instance what is rumour.
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3 June, 2015 Sabatini Building. Garden and Protocol Room
Alex Mendizabal. Concert for a Patio, a Room, ½ a Litre of Liquid Soap, Water, 248 Balloons, Taps and Etceteras
This concert uses 248 balloons as a wind instrument, which, together with soap and water, explore two very different acoustic spaces: on one side, the space in the bay of the vaults and the different woods in the Protocol Room, originally conceived as a kitchen before becoming a space for linens in the 19th century, the Protocol Room in 1986 and a gallery for temporary exhibitions in the present day, where the sound is warmer and more contemplative. And on the other, the garden’s open space, the only one remaining of the five designed by the hospital in the 18th century, where the balloons weave a fusion of changing tones to circulate around.
Over the last 30 years, Alex Mendizabal has intervened in different musical and sound environments, setting out from more traditional compositional arrangements such as sheet music and magnetic tape to include playful and heterodox forms. He has participated in the Ertz festival (Bera).
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10 June, 2015 Sabatini Building, Room 210
Rhodri Davies. Eliane Radigue: Occam I
Occam I was formulated by composer Eliane Radigue for Rhodri Davies in 2011. The piece is based on the electromagnetic and audible spectrum, the relationship of the body to waves and, of course, the William of Ockham principle, according to which the simplest idea will probably be the correct one. Room 102 was designed as a nursing space and currently houses Richard Serra’s piece Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi (1986), a sculpture with a strong historical content which formally enters into dialogue with the space and the body of the viewer.
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Eliane Radigue, a renowned French composer, has worked with the modular synthesiser since the 1960s, developing diverse electronic pieces. More recently she has composed works for acoustic instruments.
Rhodri Davies, a free improvisation artist, is characterised by his use of rare sounds and timbres, in addition to barely changing, low and near silent volumes. He frequently works with the saxophonist John Butcher and the composer Philip Corner, among others.
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17 June, 2015 Sabatini Building, Room 210
Itziar Okariz. Performance for Palms and Rooms
Itziar Okariz normally uses amplification and delay as expressive mediums to join the voice and body. On this occasion she works with space and audience through the use of applause, a sign of acceptance often shown in performing arts. This gesture and sound is tightly codified and controlled; rarely is it spontaneous and its timings and intensities have a specific meaning in auditoriums and theatres. Yet applause can also be over signified, for instance when it starts to conclude a performance that no longer holds any interest, or when it is given slowly as a sign of derision. In the context of this intervention it is over exposed and conditioned by response and place.
The work of Itziar Okariz is characterised by actions produced that question norms surrounding language and the production of signs that define us as subjects. In her work, repetition and the decontextualisation of gestures and actions take on particular importance.
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24 June, 2015 Sabatini Building, Garden
Alberto Bernal (with Neopercusión). Mobile. Work for a Percussion and a Performer
Mobile has been specifically composed for this space and programme and aims to explore the main garden in the Sabatini Building through four moving percussionists. For this purpose, the group of performers will traverse the corridors, turning the garden into another instrument. The piece analyses the sonorous possibilities of percussion and its relationship with the architecture, sculptures, vegetation, earth and water concentrated in the same garden. This spatial score makes use of four outer and four inner corners that form the corner points of Alexander Calder’s monumental sculpture Carmen, which has stood in the garden since 1992.
Alberto Bernal is a composer and sound artist with a classical background and eclectic influences who puts together pieces in the crossroads between music and visual arts. His work involves the search for limits: between aesthetics and socio-politics and between traditional spheres of perception – sound, images, words and daily perceptions.
Resonance. Concerts for Another Listening
Alberto Bernal (with Neopercusión). Mobile. Work for a Percussion and a Performer
Held on 20, 27 May, 03, 10, 17, 24 Jun 2015
Resonance is a series of sound interventions for a specific site, activating the acoustic and historical space in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Sabatini Building. The programme refrains from using the auditorium and electronic amplification, which means guest artists, musicians and composers will present a series of pieces that set in motion alternative contexts for sound and contemporary music.
This series lays out a set of interventions that work with unwanted echoes and resonances, developing the properties sound possesses, depending on where it is produced – a quality that the careful design of auditoriums, speakers and earphones have tried to make us forget.
Modern music in Europe changes with the buildings that houses it. There is a type of opera for a type of opera house, while the waltz in large-scale rooms does not possess the same musical form as swing music in dance halls. Buildings designed for listening such as auditoriums – which are becoming increasingly more specialised – direct attention frontally or define space shared by the musician and listener. The introduction and popularisation of the record player, electronic amplifiers and radio have established new ways of listening based on reproduction, where the musician and listener become more and more distanced and where there is no control over who accesses the symbolic space of the music.
This series puts forward other paradigms of listening, introducing six sound interventions as possible alternatives to the traditional history of modern resonance. Where are we when we listen? When we listen are we in another world or inside the music? writes Veit Earlman. Listening is to live in the sound, and the pieces for these other modes of listening in the Sabatini Building include, among others: a collective performance for voices and vaults by Mattin, a wind concert without blowing for garden and rooms by Alex Mendizabal and a duo for two saxophones and two staircases by Jean Luc Guionnet and Artur Vidal.
Curatorship
José Luis Espejo
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the Mapfre Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.