Held on 12 nov 2020
“Devoting countless hours to learning books by heart seems to contradict every principle governing what we understand by human effort from modernity. Whether it be an artistic or life experience, it seems an obvious and unjustifiable waste of time. It creates nothing new, no new idea that changes or improves the state of things, no new image that helps us to comprehend our problems".
Mette Edvardsen
“Learning by heart is perhaps the best possible reading of a book, by a reader who is moved and captivated, willing to learn the text in such a way that it becomes an integral part of her living organism”.
Victoria Pérez Royo
“Autorías Subterráneas. Texto, cuerpo y vida en Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine” en Tropelías. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada (2), 2017
The Museo Reina Sofía presents, in a collaboration with the Oslo Biennial (2019–2024), Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project in which people from different countries learn books of their choice by heart. Together they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated points, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.
Time has fallen asleep… focuses on the importance of memory and word of mouth, on producing conditions of encounter between people, on proximity, intimacy and care, by dint of a liking for highly divergent books: novels, essays, poetry, prose. The title comes from a phrase that appears in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which is set in a future society where books are forbidden, causing a community of people to go underground to learn the last existing books with a view to conserving them. Thus, in this activity learning by heart is done as an ongoing practice in time. The project aspires to nothing material — learning a book by heart means to take on a continuous process of recalling and forgetting.
Between 2020 and 2021, the Museo will welcome, in different formats, public events devoted to searches in this specialised library. On this first occasion, two new living books have been produced in Spanish. People who are interested can request the reading-transmission of these two books in the Museo Reina Sofía Library, or receive any of the five books listed at the top by post. Therefore, a total of seven living books — two in an in-person, oral format and five received by mail — form the catalogue of this first public moment.
Since its inception in 2010, the project has been presented in over fifty book shops and libraries in different cities, with a growing number of living books that make up a library currently holding 88 titles in English, French, Arabic, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, German, Polish, Estonian, Swedish, Danish and Greenlandic.
Living books available:
In oral format:
- Amuleto (1999), by Roberto Bolaño
- La hora de la estrella (1977), by Clarice Lispector
By mail:
- Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), by Herman Melville
- A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), by Anne Boyer
- Mrs Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
- Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
- I Am a Cat (1905), by Soseki Natsume
Sponsorship
Credits:
Concept: Mette Edvardsen
Participants: Mette Edvardsen, Violeta Gil, Andrea Rodrigo, Alexandra Napier, Jon Refsdal Moe, Emmilou Rößling and Kristien Van den Brande
Production: Mette Edvardsen / Athome Manyone
Co-production: Dubbelspel - STUK Kunstencentrum & 30CC (Louvain), Dance Umbrella (London), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), NEXT Arts Festival (Valenciennes, Lille, Kortrijk, Villeneuve d'Ascq), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), osloBIENNALEN First Edition 2019-2024 (Oslo), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid)
Support: Arts Council Norway / Norsk Kulturråd
Participants
Mette Edvardsen lives between Oslo and Brussel and works in the sphere of stage arts and performance, in addition to her explorations in other mediums and formats such as video and the publishing and experimental composition of books. Due to her training as a dancer and participation in choreographic projects and prestigious companies like les ballets C de la B and Mårten Spångberg, her work is often framed inside the field of dance. Perhaps it is the place from which she investigates modes of generating practices and situations, although her work does break out beyond such disciplinary limits, delving into hard-to-classify terrains, with an interest in the relationship between language and action running through the centre of her work. Edvardsen is currently a researcher at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and an associated artist at the Black Box theatre in the same city. She is also a founder, with Juan Domínguez, Alma Söderberg and Sarah Vanhee, of the collaborative platform Manyone.
![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
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Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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.
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In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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