Studium Generale. The Deep-rooted Word
With Marilyn Boror and María Sánchez
Marilyn Boror, Edicto Cambio de nombre (Change of Name Edict), 2018. Courtesy of the artist
Held on 13 Jun 2025
Studium Generale is an annual encounter between the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Museo Reina Sofía, and falls within the framework of their collaboration on the Bachelor’s Degree in Art. The name of the encounter refers to the term for a compendium of schools in the Middle Ages: a kind of open proto-university assembling teachers, students and the teaching of different disciplines and from different geographical origins. The encounter combines different points of co-existence between the academic community and the Museo’s teams in a public programme orbiting around contemporary debates which fuel artistic practice and research.
This edition, with the title The Deep-rooted Word, probes situated practices of art-making, community imagination and political agency, thereby seeking to analyse our relationship with land and territory via the links between word, up/rooting and dis/memory.
In recent years, there has been an increasingly clear alignment between criticism of the exploitation of the earth and women’s role as the load-bearers of life. It is no coincidence that, since 2009, with a lack of government action, it was a collective of Indigenous women who took it upon themselves to clean industrial waste from Lake Atitlán (Guatemala). This movement is just one example of many that have shown women’s leadership to protect the environment in Latin America.
Despite women also taking up the first line of defence in protecting the earth and non-human lives in Spain, the majority feminist political model remains “urban”, with urbanity understood as the spatial decline of the modern mentality. Thus, we have come to neglect caring for knowledge, memories, words and seeds which inhabit the bodies of those who engage with territory and earth with their hands.
To delve further into these issues, the encounter pivots on the work of Marilyn Boror, an artist and curator from Guatemala, and María Sánchez, a poet and field veterinarian who lives in Galicia. Rooted in their respective contexts, the practice of both artists shows art’s potential to combine different knowledge with the aim of re-reading territories and their tensions, restoring a complex vision which is distanced from the bucolic and the catastrophic.
The activity is made up of an initial presentation and the activation of each guest’s artistic expression, followed by a space of dialogue and conversation.
Curators
Laia Blasco Soplon (UOC), Anna Busquets (UOC), Elena Corrales Pérez (Museo Reina Sofía), Muriel Gómez Pradas (UOC), María Íñigo Clavo (UOC), Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga (Museo Reina Sofía), Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín (UOC), Ana Beatriz Vidal González (Museo Reina Sofía)
Programme
Studium Generale
Inside the framework of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
Organised
Participants
is a Maya Kaqchikel artist, independent curator, art lecturer, and Guatemalan cultural manager, recognized for her extensive material experimentation and deeply rooted social practice. Her work engages with themes of Indigenous identity, historical memory, colonialism, and resistance, establishing a dialogue between tradition and contemporary structures of art. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and has undertaken artist residencies at institutions such as Fundación Ama Amoedo (Uruguay, 2023), ARTE-UNAM (Mexico, 2022), Galería Muy (Mexico, 2019), and EspIRA/ESPORA (Nicaragua, 2013–2016). She has also delivered lectures and talks at internationally renowned academic and museum spaces, including Cornell University, Stamps Gallery, the Institute for Contemporary Art (United States), and Museo Amparo (Mexico, 2024). Her work is part of international collections such as those of the Museo Reina Sofía (Spain), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Panama), the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende (Chile), and Art Nexus (Colombia).
María Sánchez
is a veterinarian and writer. She works to advocate other forms of production and other ways of relating to the earth, for instance agro-ecology, grazing and extensive farming. She coordinates the project Las entrañas del texto (The Entrails of Text), prompting a reflection on the creative process, and Almáciga (Seedling), an open and collective seedbed of words from our rural areas, from the different languages in our territory. Fuego la sed (La Bella Varsovia, 2024) is her most recent published work, a poetry collection which is “militantly lyrical” and about “human decisions which impact the course of a stream or the flight of a bird”.
Programme
6:30pm Welcome and presentation
6:45pm TEN STEPS TOWARDS DEATH. “Names as Evidence of the Colonial Wound”
— Action carried out by Marilyn Boror
7:15pm Good Shade
— Reading by María Sánchez
7:45pm Marilyn Boror and María Sánchez in Conversation
— Accompanied by María Íñigo Clavo and Ana Vidal González
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.