Avestruce de la compañía I Piccoli, 2024. Fotografía: Andrea Chenich
Held on 08, 08 feb 2025
At the heart of the puppet show Varietà are Vittorio Podrecca’s marionettes. The stage piece, in which a truck becomes the stage, is part of the itinerant project I Piccoli di Podrecca on the Road produced by Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giualia, and which continues with the work Podrecca began with Teatro dei Piccoli.
Under Massimo Gambarutti’s direction, the puppeteers breathe life into the Piccoli puppets, which, in the words of orchestra director Arturo Toscanini, “are a unique phenomenon in the history of theatre art” and are cherished by wide-ranging audiences. With each movement — by virtue of an intricate system of strings — the marionettes make precise gestures, for instance playing an instrument, opening their eyes and shaking their hair. At the end of the performance, the audience members have the chance to take a closer look at the figures to fathom their movements and to gain an idea of the complexity of this long-standing profession. The activity takes place inside the framework of the Museo’s exhibition Esperpento. Popular Art and Aesthetic Revolution, the rooms of which also display Podrecca figures.
Teatro dei Piccoli was founded in Rome in 1914 by Vittorio Podrecca, in collaboration with musical editor Luigi Fornaciari and puppeteer Giovanni Santoro, and later gained international renown. Its chief innovation rested in putting forward a predominantly musical repertoire comprising adaptations of operas, operettas and zarzuelas, scenes from Commedia dell’Arte, pantomimes and stories, variety numbers and popular dances.
The Commedia dell’Arte and puppet theatre would, at the dawn of the twentieth century, contribute to the renewal of performing art — unsurprisingly, Ramón María Valle-Inclán became interested in this model, asserting: “I’m doing something new and different to my previous works. I now write for puppets. It is something I have created and title them ‘esperpentos’. This kind of theatre is performed by puppets, not people, in the manner of Teatro dei Piccoli in Italy”. In his works Tablado de marionetas (Stage for Marionettes) and El honor de don Friolera / Martes de carnaval (The Honour of Don Friolera/Carnival Tuesday) Valle-Inclán employed literary elements and forms from popular tradition to openly denounce his disagreement with de facto powers.
This interest in figure theatre is also conspicuous in the work of other avant-garde artists such as Manuel de Falla, who in 1923 in Paris premiered El retablo de Maese Pedro (The Altarpiece of Maese Pedro), a work which used parody and caricature to present an aesthetic critique of reality based on a chapter from Don Quixote. Therefore, Valle-Inclán considered it another precedent of esperpento.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Credits
Puppet master: Massimo Gambarutti
Puppeteers: Roberta Colacino, Federica Di Cesare, Gaia Mencagli and Guido Sciarroni
Coordination: Giampaolo Andreutti
Production: Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia, cwith the contribution of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia - Regional Department of Culture and Sport
![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)
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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