Held on 13, 14, 18 Apr, 25 May 2023
This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.
The title of the activity, When Destiny Catches Up with Us, is a translation of the Spanish translation of Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green, a futuristic vision of the year 2022, when over-industrialisation and overpopulation have pushed the planet to tipping point and caused food shortages. The picture is structured as a police crime drama with its main plot thread the commercialisation of the only food product the population has access to: the plankton-based “Soylent Green”. The film is based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, originally published in 1966.
Our present seems to teeter dangerously close to Fleischer’s fiction: in 2022, Scientist Rebellion, a sister organisation of Extinction Rebellion, warned that the planet had already reached the point of no return. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN), human behaviour has been responsible for the extinction of 60% of wildlife over the last forty years, while the “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi” report, published by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, states that two out of every five plant species are in danger of extinction. Furthermore, the studies carried out by authors in the article “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers”, in the journal Biological Conservation, reveal that the dramatic drop in the world’s insect populations could lead to the extinction of 40% of species in the coming decades. Out of the five previous extinctions, some hypotheses draw parallels between the present and the Permian-Triassic, an extinction that occurred two hundred and fifty million years ago and ended 90% of life through a huge increase in CO₂ in the air. This time, the sixth mass extinction is advancing ten thousand times quicker.
The need to strengthen environmental politics is nothing new. In 1992, the UN organised the Earth Summit in Río de Janeiro, a convention that would lay the foundations for the Kyoto Protocol, approved in 1997, in which industrialised countries committed to limiting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 1999, Bruno Latour, in the book Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, stressed the urgent need to place ecology at the centre of politics, while a few years earlier in Mexico, the Zapatista Movement had already started to show a determined resistance to neoliberalism and its understanding of the Earth as a space for trade and with ecological policies already put into practice that, from Europe and the USA, would later be known as the Anthropocene.
On the basis of the above, this programme — organised in collaboration with TBA21 — comprises the presentation and screening of a documentary, two sound experiences and two conversations that connect, in one way or another, knowledge around the global extinction threatening the Earth.
Thursday, 13 April 2023 – 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
2020: The Walk
—Screening and Presentation by Marta Moreno Muñoz
This encounter presents the project 2020: The Walk by Marta Moreno Muñoz, an artist and activist with Extinction Rebellion, which, as an international social movement, aims to influence environmental policies to mitigate global warming, the loss of biodiversity, the mass extinction of species and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Conceptualised in 2019 and produced in the spring/summer of 2022, 2020: The Walk is the artist’s final project for her doctoral research “Art as an Experience of the Dissolution of the Self. Towards an Artistic Practice in Times of Collapse”. This videographic proposal documents the journey made, largely on foot, across the four thousand kilometres between Granada, in southern Spain, and the Arctic Circle, where the artist connected with climate activists from kindred movements and disseminated the purpose and concerns of Extinction Rebellion, while also giving talks and training on non-violent direct action.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Xoán-Xil, Ariel Ninas and Paula Ballesteros
This speculative essay, based on attentive listening and our current perspective, revisits the myth of bees in popular Galician practices associated with death. Honey bees, a pollinator species threatened with extinction, have been among the most important insects in Western culture, both for their influence on the upper classes, in contemporary Western architecture and eighteenth-century hives, and their importance in funerary rites in traditional and rural societies. For instance, in Galicia, the buzz that bees make, reproduced through the voice, would accompany the dead to the grave. This activity features the intervention of Paula Ballesteros in the staging of the book Abellón. O libro negro das zoadeiras (A Central Folque, 2020) by Xoán-Xil López and Mauro Sanín, a publication that stems from a series of intuitions, readings and investigations around buzzing as a “paramusical” sound with the capacity to reach transcendental value in different cultures. This open and thought-provoking proposal is based on sound experimentation and creation, areas which prompt us to rethink our relationship with “noise”.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 8pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Jana Winderen
This concert conducted by Jana Winderen seeks to showcase the importance of microscopic organisms which, despite being imperceptible, are essential to our planet’s ecology. Winderen, an artist based in Norway, worked on the research “The Soundscape of Anthropocene Ocean” (2021), the results of which were published in an article in the journal Science, with other artists. The text, overseen by Carlos Duarte, sets out the impact of anthropogenic noise produced by humans and the machines they manufacture and use, and how it exacerbates the extinction of sea life, already under threat from rising sea temperatures. These changes could wipe out entire populations of microscopic organisms, affecting the food chain of ocean wildlife and the production of oxygen for global survival. Winderen also studied mathematics, chemistry and ecology focused on fish, her practice focusing more deeply on sound environments and creatures that are inaccessible to humans due to physical or auditory factors such as water depths and ice or the frequency ranges which are inaudible to the human ear. Her work also includes audio-spatial site-specific installations and concerts performed in major institutions and international public spaces.
Tuesday, 18 April 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 1
Conversation between Carlos Duarte and Jana Winderen
Using sound technologies, the research group The Malaspina Expedition, with public funding from Spain and led by Carlos Duarte, recently discovered that 95% of marine biomass can be found in mesopelagic zones (lying between two hundred and one thousand metres below the ocean’s surface). Due to their diminutive size, these fish escape fishing nets and play a key role in biodiversity, along with plankton and predators. According to an article by Helen Scales published in The Guardian on 29 September 2022, the industry has been quick to respond and organisations such as AZTI (Marine and Food Science and Technology), which develops high-impact transformation projects with organisations aligned with the UN, have started to study the possibility of using mesopelagic organisms as a food for commercial fishing species to explore their potential in pharmaceutical production and animal feed.
Thursday, 25 May 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 2
Conversation between Txema Brotons and José Luis Espejo
When, how and why did humans begin listening to whales? Different cultures have heard the songs, roars and bellows of these cetaceans, yet Western culture — which has found beautiful verbs such as “clatter” for the noise storks make — still refers to the “clicks” and “songs” of cetaceans, even though none are exact descriptions. Herman Melville, long before writing Moby Dick, was said to have set sail towards Lancashire and first heard a whale, because many things are often understood through the ears before the eyes.
Listening to Oceans 2 is an encounter which brings together researcher and curator José Luis Espejo and Txema Brotons, a biologist specialised in cetaceans and the director of the Tursiops Association, to consider an archaeology of mediums through which science and other disciplines of knowledge started to listen to and classify cetacean sounds. The encounter continues with a presentation of some of the scientific studies carried out with mediums analysed archaeologically to understand the impact of anthropogenic sound on whales’ communication systems.
Curator
José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
TBA21
Inside the framework of
TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
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.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra
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.