You will see a sea of stones. About Raúl Zurita
Held on 03 May 2012
In 1979 the poet Raúl Zurita (1950) founded, along with artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, the sociologist Fernando Balcells and the writer Diamela Eltit, the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte - CADA (Art Actions Collective). The actions of this collective fall within the realm of artistic activism that took hold in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s as a political reaction to the dictatorial regimes. Six years after the military coup led by Pinochet, CADA performed actions of artistic and political resistance against the dictatorship, thus giving shape to an artistic gesture that was politically-engaged, collective and public. The actions carried out by CADA determined the poetic and political character of conceptualism in Latin America. As of 2012, the CADA archive is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.
This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. With an oeuvre in which the frontiers between text, body and landscape become blurred, from the radical experience of self-inflicted harm (the photo of his burned cheek on the cover of the bookPurgatorio), to skywriting in smoke letters over New York City in 1982 and making his verse "ni pena ni miedo" a permanent part of Atacama desert in 1993, Zurita's poetry opens itself to multiple layers of meaning, including literary, political and social meaning, and reconsiders the relationship between art and life.
This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita (Editorial Delirio, 2012). Divided into three parts which have as a backdrop the afternoon of September 10th, 1973, the night that followed and the dawn of September 11th, the day of the military coup in Chile, the book's 750 pages create a fresco in which multiple voices, dreams and images converge, where poetry becomes a novel and a novel becomes history.
Participants
Sonia Betancort. She has a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature and is an educator and cultural manager.
Fernando Castro Flórez. He is a professor of Art History at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is the curator of Ni pena ni miedo. Artistas chilenos contemporáneos (MEIAC, 2012)
Fabio de la Flor. Editor-in-chief of the publishing company Editorial Delirio, he also directs the Seminario de la Universidad de Salamanca (SDLM), the PAN Festival and is a member of the burying committee of the Museum-Mausoleum of Morille.
Raúl Zurita. Poet. Winner of Chile's National Literature Prize (2000) and of the José Lezama Lima de Cuba award (2009). His books include: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), El amor de Chile (1987), Canto de los ríos que se aman (1993) El día más blanco (2000), Poemas militantes (2010), Las ciudades de agua (2006) and Cuadernos de guerra (2012).
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The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
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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.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practicecontinues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the showsorganised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
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On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.