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BREATHE, CO-INSPIRE
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Meeting: Language or Death
Publication
Organised by: Museo Situado
Razib, Afroza and Elahi are migrants. They were born in Bangladesh and live in Madrid. On 26 March, at the height of the healthcare emergency caused by COVID-19, their fellow countryman, Mohamed Hossein, died in confinement after calling the health authorities over a six-hour period. Hossein didn’t speak fluent Spanish, and no doctor went to tend to him. Since then, all three, together with migrant and social organisations, have demanded compulsory interpreting in health centres, schools, courthouses, and State offices. Over the course of April 2020, poet Dani Zelko spoke to them by phone while under lockdown in Buenos Aires, with the exchanges, accounts and silences of Razib, Afroza, Elahi and Pepa leading to the publication Lengua o muerte (Language or Death), framed inside the project Meeting by this Argentinian artist and publisher.
Participants: Dani Zelko with Rakibul Hasan Razib, Elahi Mohammad Fazle, Afroza Rhaman and Pepa Torres Pérez
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Udlot, Udlot, by José Maceda
Concert
Video of the concert: Udlot, Udlot, by José Maceda
In March 2019, the Museo opened a call to participate in the performance of the piece Udlot Udlot (1975), by Philippine composer José Maceda, whose work combined his interest in traditional music from Southeast Asia and Europe. The performance of the piece required no prior musical knowledge, simply attendance at a workshop organised by the Museo, in collaboration with the Escuela Municipal de Música y Danza del Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera. Some one hundred people learnt the score together and kept in time with its rhythms. During the current pandemic, the experience reminds us of something essential: the power of union and respectful co-existence, not only between humans but with all other living organisms on the planet.
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Raciality and Care in the Dispute for Other Lives
Lecture
Link to the lecture: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Yayo Herrero
In this lecture from the series Six Contradictions and the End of the Present, African American activist and theorist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and anthropologist, technical engineer, social educator and ecofeminist Yayo Herrero reflect on care as the starting point for thinking about a more just and equal society, putting forward a life outside of ideas of production and economic value. Taylor focuses on the need to confront present-day racism in the USA, now a structural effect of a system which seeks to create a State of terror, while Yayo Herrero analyses how care has become precarious and circumscribes migrant collectives and women as they are essential but dismissed from all social considerations.
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Breathing
Reading group
During the early days of confinement, the Museo’s Public Activities Department came up with the idea of sharing readings and discussing them each week. These texts and encounters have woven together a place for either joint thinking and sharing common feelings and questions, or simply to get some breathing space. “It is no coincidence that the term ‘aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing,” we hear in The Great Silence (2014), a work by artists Allora & Calzadilla with a text by science-fiction writer Ted Chiang. Shortness of breath is one of the most persistent symptoms of the current virus and also a trait of the different wars against living, as recalled by philosopher Achille Mbembe in a recent text “The Universal Right to Breathe”, which is shared here. The readings and conversations include texts written under lockdown by the group’s participants, for instance “Algunas herramientas para escuchar esta pandemia: calma, silencio y quietud (Some Tools for Listening to this Pandemic: Calm, Silence and Stillness)” y “No tener olfato (No Sense of Smell)”, and the video-letter “Planta baja (Ground Floor)”.
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Fluxus to the People. Reactivations
Journeys Through the City
Journeys (Spanish version):
Espacios de batalla. Paisaje transversal
Tour de la Represión. Todo X La Praxis
Cunctatio 2024. Ficciones-paisaje en torno a la Carta de los Comunales Metropolitanos. Cunctatio
In conjunction with International Museum Day, part of the programme Fluxus to the People, organised by the Museo in 2012, is reactivated, with its invitations to open, playful and activist collectiveness by way of art actions from the Fluxus movement. More specifically, there is the restoration of routes around Madrid designed by artists, architects and urban planners, drawing inspiration from “fluxtour” critiques of gentrification in New York neighbourhoods. In the current landscape, where the only possible urban interaction is walking, these critical routes around care and memories of the city can be carried out.
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TOUCH, AFFECT
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With Three Wounds, I
Exhibition and Encounter
Exhibition: from Monday 18 May 2020
Encounter: Monday, 25 May 2020 – 6pmThis second photographic exhibition on the experience of confinement spotlights six photographic stories from the interior and intimacy of lived spaces, spaces which can be a refuge at certain times and a place of hostility at others. In these accounts the camera has served as therapy, condemnation, diary and a footprint of occurrences, where that which is photographed shows itself, once more, as an encounter between the bodies of those taking pictures, those letting themselves be photographed and those we see.
Artists: Olmo Calvo, Rubén H. Bermúdez, Edu León, Roberta Marrero, Isabel Permuy and Judith Prat
Curated by: Inés Plasencia
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The Touching Community. Aimar Pérez-Galí
Interview
Interview Iink: RRS. Aimar Pérez Galí. The Touching Community (Spanish Audio)
An interview with choreographer, dancer and researcher Aimar Pérez Galí, coinciding with the presentation of The Touching Community in the Museo Reina Sofía in December 2017. The piece creates a space of trust and mutual understanding, where bodies with different training and ages touch and are touched to an out-loud reading of letters Pérez Galí wrote to dancers who fell victim to AIDS. One, addressed to Felipe, a dancer from Madrid, can be heard on this radio podcast.
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Blinking. An Accessible and Inclusive Performance
Performance
In 2019, the women’s group La profesión va por dentro (The Profession Is Inside) conducted research into the Museo’s Collection and temporary exhibitions, granting privilege, from their varyingly adept bodies, to the emotions and role of the body when relating to the works and museum space. The upshot of this work was presented in the stage piece Blinking. An Accessible and Inclusive Performance (its research process and images are available on the Museo Reina Sofía website), whereby participants reflected upon the physical Museo’s accessibility and cognitive barriers, as well as the security protocols conditioning the visit. The group are currently working on the project Gestos CoVidianos on the lockdown situation and its effects on their bodies.
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With All My Affection
Handwritten dedications in the library of Jean Cassou
The personal library of Jean Cassou (1897–1986), the renowned French Hispanist and art critic, is part of the holdings of the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre. Consulting its contents reveals the most relevant works from the twentieth-century’s Spanish and Latin American literary landscape, in addition to an ensemble of handwritten dedications that reveal a story of affection. Noteworthy figures such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Max Aub, María Teresa de León, Jorge Guillén, Eugenio D’Ors, Miguel de Unamuno, Pedro Salinas and Manuel Altolaguirre were part of Cassou’s close circle, which in turn made the Parisian house on rue du Figuier a place for the sharing of work and friendship. This brief selection of images is also a foretaste of the digital Library project, which will offer digital access to a significant part of the Museo’s bibliographical collections.
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Breaking La Casa (The Crevice House): Transmitting the Intimate, Inventing Ourselves Together
Artistic process with Aitana Cordero
From Monday 25 to Sunday 31 May 2020
Participation with prior registration; aimed at young people aged between 15 and 21La Casa (The House) is a vast project full of ramifications and has been developed by artist Aitana Cordero over the past four years. Its point of departure is the idea of “how to destroy a theatre, how to build a house, us, together”, and takes the form of four performance pieces and a number of workshops in different parts of the world. Initially planned to be conducted on-site in the Museo, this workshop has been radically transformed by the lockdown: What is intimacy now? What do we want to transmit? Cordero joins a group of teenagers and young people aged between 15 and 21 to break down the walls of the many confinements to which our bodies are subjected, with the aim of imagining new places of encounter and rethinking the ties that bring us together in the here and now.
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TREAT, AVERT
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Driving Away Evil
A study group publication
Download Espantando el mal (Driving Away Evil)
Active since February 2020, this study group addresses the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ of life and contemporary disturbances, thus pooling forms of resistance against neoliberal logics. During this healthcare emergency, the group will draft a virtual diary series to reflect on how life has radically changed, an edition presented on International Museum Day and made from fragments of the diary in the form of a collage of images and words as it seeks to become a momentary record of an ongoing autobiographical and multiple-voiced discussion on the current unknown.
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Ecologies of Care in the Welfare State Crisis. A Dialogue Between Madrid and Trieste
Sessions
Round-table discussion. Enter Outside in Community Healthcare: Experimenting with Militant Research
In April 2019, the Museo organised these sessions on experiences of community healthcare in Madrid and Trieste with regard to institutional critique in the field of psychiatry and, specifically, to the work of Franco Basaglia. At the same time, the activity set out from the research residency Marta Malo, Marta Pérez and Pantxo Ramas carried out in 2016 in the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre, resulting in the project Enter Outside. From the Public and the Commons.
Organised around two round-table discussions, the programme analysed the history and present of care institutions devised in light of 1970s institutional critique movements. Its contributions can now be reviewed in the context of a museum with aspirations of care.
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The Death of the Clinic?
Lecture by Paul B. Preciado
Audio: ¿La muerte de la clínica? (The Death of the Clinic?)
The title of this lecture given by philosopher Paul B. Preciado in 2013 during the opening session of the programme Somateca draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963). By way of an analysis of the conquests of twentieth-century feminist and homosexual politics, which sought to dismantle the disciplinary institutions denounced by Foucault, Preciado explores models of the somato-political management of contemporary neoliberal societies. This recording of the lecture prompts us to consider the currency of these reflections, and to rethink the politics of care as a critical instrument of museum institutions.
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Time. Claudia Claremi
Audiovisual mediation project
FRAGMENT 1
FRAGMENT 2
FRAGMENT 3Time is a work in progress which, via the collective creation of an experimental film, explores the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers. The project got under way in 2019, with the line of argument of a dystopian present: in the wake of the collapse of modern society, Western culture has lost its hegemonic place and its institutions, such as museums, fall by the wayside. To this backdrop, the volunteers appear as a group of people that inhabit and preserve the Museo. The current shutdown of society has deeply shifted the meaning of the project, so much so that what was recorded as fiction now seems a plausible reality. The film, currently in the editing stage and presented here in three fragments, transposes experiences of attention towards and silent dialogue with artworks, as well as different ways of inhabiting and traversing museum space.
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Situated Feminist Pedagogies
Encounter
The reflection and dialogue around feminist pedagogies in a context of confinement like the present one, in which the education community finds itself stretched to the limit in an unprecedented dislocation of its schools, in the desire to establish a virtual education model for which nobody was prepared, can end up in itself being an exercise in care. This conversation between Alicia Bernardos, Irene Martínez, Analía Villagrán and Rosa Mari Ytarte, which took place in 2018 in the context of the programme Perturbable School, analyses key issues in education: power relations opposite care relations; bridges between scientific knowledge, popular knowledge and the role of experience; the diversity of subjects, bodies and identities; sorority networks opposite the impositions of capital.
![Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women [Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres], 1899. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933. The Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/pedagogias-peq.gif "Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women [Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres], 1899. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933. The Metropolitan Museum of Art")
Taking Care of Ourselves: For a Hospitable Museum
Special online programme. International Museum Day 2020
Held on 14 May 2020
This special programme, organised in conjunction with International Museum Day, melds the lines of work developed by the Museo Reina Sofía with the contours of a timeline of interventions which places care and the sustainability of life as an inescapable ethical priority. Taking Care of Ourselves is an ongoing action about ourselves and others, a proposal with which to put forward initiatives to question this emergency present while searching in archives and past activities to bring forth the practices and reflections accompanying us at this current moment. This analysis, however, of the current situation cannot get away from questions regarding the future, for it becomes necessary to imagine, together, the world ahead that we all want.
Today we inhabit the Museo with a vividly perceived memory of what it once was: a hospital shaken by the epidemic of the so-called Spanish flu at the beginning of the twentieth century. Amidst another ferocious pandemic, the role of the Museo as a public institution gains new meaning and is re-considered in all its dimensions and forms of expression. It is a museum that wishes to be situated and is located in a neighbourhood with residents who, like so many others, have been seriously affected by the disease — overcrowding, a lack of basic resources, rising rent prices — but also with networks of solidarity and self-organisation which once again demonstrate its vitality.
This image of a collective work in the Museo’s garden — where different life forms and temporalities co-exist — evokes, together with the memory of the former hospital, the power of mutual care in sustaining human and non-human life. By means of the hospital-garden-museum constellation, the present programme is organised into three blocks of activities, grouped together by poetic affinity and prompting a reflection of care through the senses: “Breathe, Co-inspire” stresses the need for community as a survival condition; “Touch, Affect” alludes to sensitive experiences and contact with others; and, finally, “Treat, Avert” calls upon the need for assistance around the environment in which we are situated, in addition to imagining forms of protection and transformation.
![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.