-
Thursday, 17 October – 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
1966–1982: Towards the End of the Dictatorship?
Lecture by Joan Garcés
The current political, socioeconomic and cultural crisis of the Spanish State is articulated with crisis structures from its contexts in Europe and the Mediterranean. Some of the causes are rooted in the intervention of Germany’s Third Reich and Italy in the Spanish Civil War and its final outcome in 1939; in the effects of the Cold War with the USSR on the Iberian Peninsula from July 1945; in reactions that have developed in the UK, the United States and Russia since the reunification of Germany in 1990; and in China’s projection as an economic force. This lecture, therefore, sets forth a reflection from the links of certain variants which are relevant to these events in contemporary Spain.
Presented by: Jesús Marchante and Horacio Sainz (Asociación La Comuna)
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached
-
Saturday, 19 October – 6pm / Nouvel Building, Floor 0, exhibition rooms
An Uncertain Dream
Tour around the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition
Conducted by Jesús Marchante and Horacio Sainz, Asociación La Comuna
Attendance: complete capacity
Meeting point: the adjoining area between the Sabatini Building and the Nouvel Building, Floor 1
-
Tuesday, 5 November – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Possible Futures. Speaking Through Practice
A conversation between artists Eulàlia Grau, Ana Navarrete and Paula Rubio Infante
On one side, this conversation sets out a debate on the artistic practices that have granted visibility to issues surrounding Spain’s recent past in order to consider the present and, on the other, constitutes an exercise of collective memory that encourages dialogue. Based on some of the works of the guest artists, different questions arise: At the current time, how can we re-read the reflections implicit in these works? What is at the heart of the debate today? How can we participate in it from the perspective of artistic practice or from the perspective of spectators?
Moderated by: María Cerdá Acebrón and Ramón Mateos
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached
![Eulàlia Grau. Temps de lleure (Etnografia) (Tiempo de ocio [Etnografía]). Acrílico y emulsión fotográfica sobre lienzo, 1974](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/3_2.gif "Eulàlia Grau. Temps de lleure (Etnografia) (Tiempo de ocio [Etnografía]). Acrílico y emulsión fotográfica sobre lienzo, 1974")
-
Friday, 8 November 11am / Sabatini Building, Floor 2, room 206 (Guernica and the 1930s)
Pablo Picasso and Robert Capa, Paradigms of the Horrors of War
Opening of the second edition of the Festival Robert Capa estuvo aquí (the Rober Capa Was Here Festival) and a tour from the Museo Reina Sofía to number 10, calle Peironcely, Puente de Vallecas, Madrid
In November 1936, following a string of terrifying bombings of Madrid’s civilian population by the German and Italian air forces, Hungarian photographer Endre Ernö Friedmann, better known as Robert Capa, took a picture which today has become an icon of the horrors of war and the vulnerability of childhood. In the photograph, two girls and a boy are sat on the edge of a rubble-filled pavement outside a shrapnel-riddled house that could be their home. They look happy and unconcerned by the brutal landscape surrounding them.
Capa took another shot of the same scene, this time of a teenager who, leaning against a dilapidated doorframe in the door to the house, observes the three youngsters. The first image was published in the mainstream media in the USA, France, the UK, and Switzerland and moved the entire world. Unfortunately, over the passage of time, the negatives and original paper copy were lost. Fortunately, a copy of the second image, donated by the photographer’s brother, Cornell Capa, is conserved in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.
In 2010, research conducted by José Latova and Alberto Martín Escudero identified the location of both images as number 10, calle Peironcely, in the district of Entrevías, Puente de Vallecas, Madrid. Six years later, the #SalvaPerioncely Platform, made up of over twenty pacifist cultural organisations from the USA, Germany, France, Portugal and Spain, called on the Madrid authorities to protect and expropriate the building and rehouse the current residents in suitable conditions so as to turn the property into the home of the Robert Capa Centre in order to research the aerial bombing in Madrid. On 20 July 2016, the Madrid City Council’s plenary approved the first three measures and on 27 November 2018 gave the go-ahead to create the centre.
In June 2018 a new discovery was made. Collector Juan Carlos Almazán Masso acquired a set of images of the Civil War originating from the UK, including, to date, the only original copy on paper which, although not developed from the original negatives, is the first image of calle Peironcely, and one which was disseminated internationally.
In conjunction with the second edition of the Robert Capa Was Here Festival, the Museo Reina Sofía will display the two photographs together for the first time in the rooms adjoining Guernica — three pertinent testimonies of the atrocity of war.
Programme: Robert Capa Was Here Festival
Organised by: Anastasio de Gracia-FITEL Foundation
Meeting point: the adjoining area between the Sabatini Building and the Nouvel Building, Floor 1
Capacity: 60 people
Attendance: Complete capacity
-
Saturday, 16 November – 8pm / Nouvel Building, Courtyard
Latent Peripheries. Audiovisual Reflection on Exile
Mapped projection on the front of the Sabatini Building and live music
Latent Peripheries demonstrates, in a reflection which questions the present of Peironcely 10, the viewpoint of multiple exiles that disrupts today’s society. The city has grown without looking back, in waves of speculative greed that, for economic or political reasons, has condemned many of its inhabitants to exile. These exiles have become subjects without rights who fight to stay afloat in a growing ocean of non-solidarity that puts the victim at fault, and turns difference into suspicion and diversity into dissonance. Therefore, Latent Peripheries offers a visual and sound-based reflection on these circumstances and on the vulnerability of outlying areas in cities, where inequality often resides.
Programme: Robert Capa Was Here Festival
Organised by: Anastasio de Gracia-FITEL Foundation and the Degree in Fine Arts from the Rey Juan Carlos University
Art directors: Miguel S. Moñita and Tomás Zarza
Production director: Uría Fernández
Live music: Trinidad Jiménez and Odin Kaban
Visual works: students and teachers from the Degree in Fine Arts at the Rey Juan Carlos UniversityAttendance: free, until full capacity is reached
-
Thursday, 14 and Monday, 25 November, and Wednesday, 4 December – 10:30am / Tours around Madrid
Robert Capa’s Madrid
Destroying Childhood (Thursday, 14 November)
Madrid Under Aerial Terror (Monday, 25 November)
Art in Danger (Wednesday, 4 December 2019)
The ties of Robert Capa’s professional beginnings to the Spanish Civil War and its impact on Madrid are well documented. According to Capa’s biographer, Richard Whelan, the images he took of the city “highlight that he began to understand that the truth of the war was not only found in the clamour of battle, in the official scene, but also in its contours, on the faces of soldiers enduring the cold, fatigue and tedium behind the lines, and of civilians racked with fear, suffering and loss”. Therefore, these routes follow the photographer’s footsteps and the bombs dropped on Madrid’s streets. The starting point of every tour is the Museo Reina Sofía’s room 206, Guernica and the 1930s, in which the two photographs Capa took in front of calle Peironcely 10, in 1936, are displayed.
Programme: Robert Capa Was Here Festival
Organised by: Anastasio de Gracia-FITEL Foundation
Guides: Carlos Antonio Figueroa Lillo and Aurelio Merino
Documentation: Uría Fernández and Roberto García Fernández
Capacity: 25 places per tour
Meeting point: the adjoining area between the Sabatini Building and the Nouvel Building, Floor 1
Attendance: free, with prior registration by calling +34 91 456 21 31 or writing to agfitel@agfitel.esMore information at www.festivalrobertcapaestuvoaqui.es
Return to the Future?
Eighty Years on from the End of the Spanish Civil War
Held on 17, 19 oct, 05, 08, 14, 16, 25 nov, 04 dic 2019
The 1936 coup d’état and the ensuing civil war splintered reality, the pieces scattering across complex [in]exiles, disappearances, silences… faltering and inconclusive narratives, fertile, multifocal and widespread memories that pulse and throb today, cross-examining the present and managing to distort a univocal, hegemonic gaze. Eighty years on from the end of the Spanish Civil War, the drive of the silenced once again challenges linear history and its ellipses. Thus, the programme Return to the Future? starts from an analysis of three different stages: the Dictatorship, the Transition and Democracy in Spain, reactivating critical power and confronting logics of memory from a present that strikes up a dialogue between accounts of the past and visions of possible futures.
Force line
Politics and the aesthetics of memory
Related link
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Asociación La Comuna and the Anastasio de Gracia-FITEL Foundation
Participants
María Cerdá Acebrón (Madrid, 1984) is a visual artist, researcher and teacher who currently lives and works in Mexico City. In recent years she has been working on an interdisciplinary project called Recuerdos del futuro, based around the visual memory of Republican exile in Mexico from a third-generation perspective.
Joan E. Garcés (Lliria, Valencia, 1944) is a jurist and political scientist who holds a PhD in Political Sciences from Sciences-Po and Sorbonne University, Paris, and a Degree in Law from the Complutense University of Madrid. He was personal adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. In 1999 in the Swedish Parliament he received the Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his work in the defence of international law and human rights.
Eulàlia Grau (Terrassa, 1946) is an artist whose work documents the weakness, contradictions and perversities of the capitalist system in more obvious perpetuation mechanisms such as the police, the army and prisons, and other more subtle ones like family, school and the media. Among other issues, her concerns centre on gender critique, calling out the situation of abuse and inequality for women and questioning female stereotypes in the public and private sphere.
Jesús Marchante (Alcázar de San Juan, Ciudad Real, 1954) and Horacio Sainz (Madrid, 1953) are members of La Comuna, an association of ex-prisoners and victims of political reprisals from Francoism, set up in the spring of 2011. The association takes its name from the communes that organised resistance in prisons and is made up of a broad range of people who suffered reprisals during the Franco regime and others acutely aware of the ideology of truth, justice and remediation vindicated by the association.
Ramón Mateos (Madrid, 1968) is a visual artist, curator and teacher who currently lives and works in Madrid. For many years he has been working on a project to create collaboration networks with other collectives and artists. His most recent output prompts the spectator to reflect on their position as a citizen, assess their capacity to act and become aware of what surrounds them, as well as evaluating their potential to change their environment.
Ana Navarrete Tudela (Valencia, 1965) is a visual artist, teacher and researcher who currently lives in Cuenca, working as a senior lecturer in the Art Department at the Facultad de Bellas Artes. She is also head researcher of Subproyecto2 from AEMA (the Spanish Archive of Media Art) and director of MIDECIANT (the International Electrography Museum – Centre of Innovation in Art and New Technologies), with her academic interest focusing on cultural practices of social resistance and the analysis of gender identity and violence against women.
Paula Rubio Infante (Carabanchel, Madrid, 1977) is a visual artist who lives in Asturias. She is currently working on the project Esto es un agujero, for which she obtained a 2019 Visual Arts Grant from the Community of Madrid. In 2018 she published Castillo negro. Sucesos creativos en torno al Sanatorio Psiquiátrico Penitenciario de Carabanche via a 2017 Creation Grant, again from the Community of Madrid.
![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
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.
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.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
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.
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.
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.