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Friday, 15 March 2019 – 7pm
Session 1
With a presentation by Albert Serra
Shuji Terayama
Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Japan, 1971, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 35mm transferred to digital, 27’Koji Wakamatsu
The Embryo Hunts in Secret
Japan, 1966, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 35mm transferred to digital, 73’’
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Wednesday, 20 March 2019 – 5pm
Session 2
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
The Confessions of Winifred Wagner
Germany, 1977, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, 35mm transferred to digital, 302’
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Friday, 29 March 2019 – 7pm
Session 3
Carolee Schneemann
Meat Joy
USA, 1964, colour, original version, 16mm transferred to digital, 5’Paul Morrissey
Flesh
USA, 1968, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 16mm transferred to digital, 89’
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Friday, 5 April 2019 – 7pm
Session 4
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Friday, 12 April 2019 – 7pm
Session 5
Ulrich Seidl
Models
Austria, 1999, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, video, 118’
Held on 15, 20, 29 mar, 05, 12 abr 2019
In Me Too. Desire and Crime the Museo Reina Sofía invites Albert Serra to curate, for the first time in his career, a series of screenings which run alongside his new film installation, Personalien, made for the Museo’s Fissures programme. Serra’s voice is one of the most original in the reinvention of contemporary cinema, attested to by the Golden Leopard Award (Locarno, 2013), the Jean Vigo Award (2016), the Grand Prix Award at FIDMarseille (2018), and other prizes.
Across five sessions, the screened films allude to the film-maker’s cinematic references, developing a key theme in his recent films and audiovisual installations: the struggle between desire and morals, between emancipation and ethics, between impulse and duty, between a world of debauchery and other moral limits. Serra has approached this controversy in a cinematic history which transcends genre, becoming at once an allegory and emblem of the present, constituting an image of contemporaneity, for instance in the passage from illustration to Romanticism, in the encounter between Casanova and Dracula in Historia de mi muerte (The Story of My Death, 2013), in the slow and spurious demise of total power in La muerte de Luis XIV (The Death of Louis XIV, 2016) and Roi soleil (The Sun King, 2018), and, finally, in Personalien (2019), where sexual utopia in the twilight of the Ancien Régime at the end of the 18th century counters contemporary desire, articulated as a question of rights.
The series sees Albert Serra select different manifestations of desire in dark, varied episodes in the history of cinema, from the Japanese underground or Warhol’s Factory and entourage in late 1968 to post-dramatic and performative cinema by contemporary film-makers such as João Pedro Rodrigues and Ulrich Seidl. This journey, assembled as “cruising between images and impulses,” in the words of the film-maker, is an approach to desire understood as totalitarian power, psychological liberation through the uses of the body, social emancipation during counterculture and an outwardly fetishist and perverse dictatorship.
The title of the series refers to the Me Too movement and the moral involvement of the spectator’s gaze, while the subheading alludes to a key manifesto of modernity, Ornament and Crime (1908), in which the architect Adolf Loos identifies functionalism or structure with virtue, while decoration, the ‘flesh’ of architecture, is the voluptuous element and thus superfluous and criminal. Furthermore, upon choosing films that seek transgression, Serra pays homage to Amos Vogel’s book Film as Subversive Art (1974) – he also wrote a foreword in the French reprint (Capricci, 2016) – a cult essay on avant-garde film.
Curatorship
Albert Serra
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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.