Activities

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre organise, in collaboration with PhotoBook Club Madrid, Harvest, an annual public encounter which presents photobook mock-ups and is open to creators of every stripe. Photobooks have now become one of the biggest vehicles of expression for contemporary photographic creation, with Harvest 2023 an encounter which looks to gauge and share current activity in this field.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre, in collaboration with hablarenarte, put forward a family-oriented illustration workshop with Olga de Dios. Through the use of spray as a pictorial tool — combined with other more traditional tools like the paint brush — the workshop addresses issues such as creative fear, managing mistakes, the development of imagination and the experience of collective work.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre bring forward World Book Day to 21 April to participate in the BookCrossing initiative of other Spanish museums and cultural centres. The initiative is about “freeing” a series of books in different public spaces, in this case in the Museo and its surrounding areas. Anyone can take these books home to, once read, repeat the action.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

This new edition of Documents recovers the work of female cartoonists such as Montse Clavé, Ana Miralles, Núria Pompeia and Mariel Soria, and serves as a prelude to a document-based show on the same theme, to be held in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre in 2023. 

Inside the framework of Madrid Otra Mirada (Another View of Madrid), the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre Department and its Architecture, Sustainable Development and General Services Area put forward two events which look to approach and delve deeper into knowledge around the institution’s rich cultural heritage.

The activity is made up of a morning workshop — split into three groups with different access — which aims to raise awareness, through four stations based on the principles of four-colour printing, of the array of possibilities within the artist’s book, from its poetic beginnings with Mallarmé and Apollinaire to its more contemporary expressions.

Harvest 2022 sets out to debate and reflect upon the editing and production of photobooks, inviting anyone immersed in the lay-out stage of a project to share their photographic work with the other participants.   

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre bring World Book Day forward to Friday, 22 April, joining different Spanish museums and cultural centres in flooding cities with books. In this new instalment of BookCrossing, publications related to contemporary art will be freed up during the whole day.

When you hear the word “library”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Books? Full shelves? Study? Complete silence? This architecture workshop invites people to discover the nature of the Museo Reina Sofía Library, the history of its construction and the use of its space while passing through. What’s it like inside? What happens if it is explored with a set objective or from another perspective? No doubt there will be unexpected discoveries!

Look Closely is one of the action lines that shapes the mediation programme Casi libros (Almost Books). This particular line centres on training users in the artistic and documentary holdings from the Museo’s Library and disseminating manifold specialist tools designed for art research and contemporary creation by way of a series of formats comprising workshops, courses and thematic guides, to take place over the course of a year.

To mark the 16^th edition of Book Night, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre present a new poem by artist Eduardo Scala entitled INSTANTeTERNO (INSTANT and ETERNAL), written for this occasion.

Harvest 2021, therefore, sets out a debate and reflection around publishing and producing photobooks, inviting people immersed in the layout phase of a project to share their photographic works with the other participants.

The Museo Reina Sofía takes part in the 15^th edition of Book Night, an initiative organised by the Community of Madrid to promote reading and grant visibility to the activities of different cultural centres and institutions inside this sphere.

The second activity in the programme Documentos, which revolves around themes related to the Museo Reina Sofía Documentation Centre, is Zines of the Zone: a “nomadic library” bringing together some 1,500 fanzines, photobooks and self-edited photo-zines which all share the use of photography.