TIZ 2. Writing With No Idea

This workshop for families with children aged between 6 and 12 travels through, analyses and plays with the Library’s architecture, the work of French architect Jean Nouvel, which is presented as a haven of peace amid the hubbub of Madrid. Children and adults will closely examine and gaze, architecturally, at the building, observing from another point of view, from experimentation and play. The tour ends with a collective construction of scale models to imagine the ideal library in the 21st century, in accordance with the current needs of users (adults and youngsters).

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration: Chiquitectos and AMECUM

Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations that take place in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. The programme is made up of different thematic strands, the title based on the poem Free Union (1931) by André Breton in its definition of psychic automatism as an alternative to rationalism. The transgressive spirit of that poem, which takes apart rational discourse through a lexical juxtaposition to generate other relationships and significations, governs this public programme, in which recitals, readings, debates, performances and actions in these rooms transgress the aura of the white cube.

The first of these events, Avant-garde Gatherings, is activated in rooms 201.01, 201.02 and 201.03. Holy Bohemia. Madrid, Paris, Barcelona, Room 202.03. Stridentopolis. An Urban Utopia and Room 203.01. Madrid, a Diverse City in which fin de siècle cuplés and a series of machine-like, phonetic sound concerts on these avant-garde movements are performed.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

This activity puts forward a mediation device around the collection of photobooks, addressing questions that include: What do the works in the Museo and the Library have in common? What are the connections between customary publications and artistic ones? What can a museum’s library learn from a local newsstand? And what similarities do Roy Lichtenstein’s works and HELLO! magazine share? These questions are all set out in a morning workshop — split into three different access groups — in which, via four seasons based on the principles of four-colour process printing, attendees will explore the origins of this discipline and its foremost creators.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration: Colectivo HUL

This new edition of the Documents programme welcomes poet, artist and editor Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith, an archive theorist, a poet in the sphere of “non-creative writing” — a concept based on plagiarism, appropriation and the non-subjective use of literature — and the creator of the digital platform ubuweb, a paradigm of the immaterial museum of modern and contemporary art, will give a lecture on the history and challenges of this platform, a workshop on radical archive practices in the Museo Reina Sofía, and a second workshop on “non-creative writing” in the Centro de Arte José Guerrero and La Madraza.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, Centro de Arte José Guerrero and La Madraza. Centro de cultura contemporánea de la Universidad de Granada

Through the paths leading from Marxism-Leninism and the fight for national liberation to pop culture — with or against post-modern banality, denying or desiring the local evolution of Madrid’s Movida cultural movement — the experience of the Rompente collective in Galicia during the Transition to democracy is articulated here. Fanzines, gatherings, verses, performances, collages, concerts, video clips and vinyl records shape a sprawling poetic-political archive. Four decades on from the collective’s disbandment, the historical meaning of this community of artists, poets, musicians and likeminded figures is reflected and worked upon in an encounter, focusing on its memory, forms of artistic production and political by-products. In the voices of its leading figures and witnesses, and via the perspectives of younger poets, critics and researchers, a collective journey is set forth around the world of the Atlantic underground in the 1970s and 1980s, the echoes and forms of which still interrogate us from the seas of Vigo.     

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Bioliterature is conceived as a series of sessions in which writing forms converge around authors whose careers defy distances between subjects and language, between the self and us, between the public and the private. For this first session, the literary work of Rafael Chirbes, which speaks to us of disarticulated and violent nature intrinsically constituting our times, has been selected. The memory of repression, the dignity of poverty, the suppression of memory, the marks of class on the body, crossed interests and desires, literary history as an alternative national history, polyphony as a factory of subjectivity and construction as a poetic legacy for a future democracy are themes which, from Chirbes’s literary world, still interrogate us.    

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Taking as its reference point the project founded in 1975 by Ulises Carrión, Other Books and So, one of the world’s first bookshops of artists’ publications, this reading club is an initiative open to every type of public and is held within the context of the Museo and scores of actions on contrasting scales — by turns interwoven and distant. A literary proposal that looks to circulate through the Museo transversally, with a view to grasping it from different gazes, questioning, inhabiting and accompanying it in its changes. That is: understanding the book not only as a literary possibility, but also an historical, artistic, social, political and exhibition possibility, and creating a space so between us we can evolve in the process. The programme comprises four interconnected blocks that explore different themes from four publications and includes different activities, gatherings and activations.

Coordinated by: Alberto Medina and Daniel Pecharromán
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration: Asociación de Mediadoras de la Comunidad de Madrid (AMECUM)

Museo Reina Sofía joins up with Red Interlavapiés (The Interlavapiés Network) to organise a small Spanish Language School for migrant residents in the Community of Madrid who require knowledge and use of the local language as a tool for day-to-day communication, work and involvement in society.

The classes take place in two constantly alternating spaces: the workshop spaces and the rooms of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, where a direct dialogue is struck up with the works on display, giving rise to subjects related to daily life which are worked upon in the different sessions — intersections resulting in a creative personal experience combining image and word (oral or written).

Coordinated by: Red Interlapaviés
Organised by: Museo Situado

In recent years, the widespread perception of time speeding up has become apparent, and we commonly note problems with or a lack of concentration, attention deficit in children and having to resort to medication and therapies to “stop our minds” and to learn to live in the here-and-now. What is happening to our attention span? 

In The School of Listening, the Museo’s training programme for teachers, a workshop coordinated by Amador Fernández-Savater puts forward a space of conversation based on the shared reading of a selection of texts that approach the contemporary problem of attention from different fronts, including childhood, care, philosophy, psychology, science, teaching, art and politics. Reading and conversation, experiences which, in their own right, are practices of intimate and relational attention.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofia

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Spain was enmeshed in the crisis of ’98, its political class agreeing to remain neutral in the First World War. This neutrality brought with it economic development and Barcelona and Madrid strengthened their relations in Europe, taking on a renewed cosmopolitan demeanour. Madrid welcomed international artists fleeing from the war, helping to create a heterogenous group of creators who, accustomed to working on multi-disciplinary projects, would end up shaping the ultraist experience. Madrid’s cafés thus became spaces of sociability and cultural transformation as different gatherings sprouted around figures such as Rafael Cansinos Asséns and Ramon Gómez de la Serna. 

The Documents magazine, edited by Georges Bataille, brought together contributors to Surrealist dissidence such as Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, André Masson and Joan Miró, along with experts in ethnography, numismatics, jazz and archaeology. The room assembles works by some of the people who contributed to the magazine, which was famous for the way it used different forms of montage and the association between image and text; the magazines that bound together Surrealism are constituent of the total action of the movement. Documents was published in Paris in 1929 and 1930 and comprises 15 issues characterised by the relationships these editions established between art-making and contemporary theory in different areas. The artists that contributed to the magazine operated outside official circles, as established by André Bretón, and the publication played a crucial role in this respect, becoming a stage for dissident Surrealism. 

This room assembles works that revolve around the figure of Max Aub (1903–1972), whose literary talent and political commitment turned him into a reference point beyond question in 1920s and 1930s Spain. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Aub joined the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Writers for the Defence of Culture from Madrid, was a cultural attaché to the Spanish Embassy in Paris and, appointed by the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts, was a member of the Delegated Commission for Spain’s cultural expansion abroad. Also a friend of painters such as Josep Renau and an active agent in the Guernica commission for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, Aub embarked upon a series of novels entitled El laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth) in 1939, the year of his exile, narrating the experience of the Civil War and the internment camps. He returned to Spain in 1969, to a country that contrasted sharply with the one he had left behind and imagined during his exile, as expressed in the pages of the diary La gallina ciega (Blind Man’s Bluff, 1971).

A climate of fear accompanied by scarcity and hardship settled in the post-war period. Opposite a more traditional reading of this era, centred on the study of official events or the existence of influential cultural groups, such as the salons of Eugeni d’Ors, the emotional, affective, economic and social climate of the time is invoked by assembling highly divergent materials, crossing, transversally, “high” and “low” culture. Furthermore, it shows the subversive potential of humour which, as the curator Mery Cuesta recalls, became instrumental to avant-garde movements to fight against social conventions, encompassing theatre (with Francisco Nieva), film (with Edgar Neville) and the publishing world (with the publication La Codorniz). On display in this room are some of Enrique Herreros’s covers for this publication, as well as the series of prints La tauromaquia de la muerte (Bullfighting of Death, 1946).

The vindication of reality that got under way in the late 1950s led to a more radical challenge to notions of artwork and authorship, placing value on the poetics of the process and the objectual nature of the work. Inside this context, artworks became footprints of a broader poetic universe and forms of expression such as those by Marcel Broodthaers, who, to symbolically mark his move from poetry to visual arts, set fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster to create the piece that lends the room its title. The “death of the author” was the term thinkers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault gave to a process of demythologising the figure of the artist — opposite this figure self-absorbed in genius, artists tested self-critical, poetic and ironical strategies: happenings, wordplays and a vindication of the everyday were some of their new resources.

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, 1937) is one of the pre-eminent representatives of Spanish conceptual art. His body of work, with its committed stance and far removed from art’s commercial side, cannot be placed easily in customary exhibition spaces and contexts. This exhibition focuses on one of the mediums he has used more extensively in his investigations: the book and publishing format. Many of his reflections around the book concept are evinced in his work ilimit, created in 2012 for the publishing and art space Ivorypress, in a nine-volume edition with two artist’s proofs, and displayed in this documentary show. The work explores the contrast between the concepts of limited and unlimited as it sets forth a reflection around the terms seriation and exclusiveness, both frequent in the art world. The work is joined by different archive documents which afford greater depth in the project and in the conceptual process that shapes this creation.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration: Ivorypress

Leaving the Margin sets forth a new way of approaching the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a selection of readings taken from the holdings housed in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre. Under this transversal gaze, the document not only plays a key role in understanding the historical-artistic context, but also takes on additional value through dialogue and a comparison with other pieces in the Museo. To carry out this first “read” tour, it takes Episode 2. The Lost Thought as its point of departure (Sabatini Building. Floor 4), placing the focus on the Republican exile sparked by the victory of the Nationalist Faction during the Spanish Civil War.  

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre is a study and research centre specialised in contemporary art that conserves a major artistic and documentary archive, its significant holdings housed in a building of unique beauty, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. This tour offers the chance to discover its facilities, the history of the institution, its roles and the services it renders. It also presents a selection of relevant bibliographic and documentary holdings (printouts, ephemera, photobooks, artists’ books, ancient holdings, etc.).

These guided tours around the documentary show ilimit seek to delve into the work carried out by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina around the book concept understood as an artistic practice. His work in this field has not only focused on analysing this object in its formal and material dimension, attempting to pass through the limits and ideas traditionally associated with these objects, but also to recognise its importance in transmitting ideas and knowledge.

Published by L'Internationale Online and edited by Jennifer Hayashida and Corina Oprea, this digital publication is a collection of poetic responses to one of today’s most pressing issues: How do we survive unnatural disasters? Starting from a collective reading of Francis Marie Lo’s poetry book A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters(Commune Editions, 2016), the poets and artists Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Léuli Eshrāghi, Fernanda Laguna, Napo Masheane, tacoderaya and Merve Ünsal have resituated their critique of catastrophic discourse in other urgent pasts and presents through different poetic, visual, discursive and sound formats. What are the poetics we are left with when the unnatural entanglements of “disaster” are taken apart and reconstructed?

Organised by: L’Internationale
Inside the framework of: Our Many Europes