Activities

The lecture series Picasso 1906. The Turning Point is articulated around the same-titled exhibition held in the Museo from 15 November 2023 to 4 March 2024. The programme brings together eminent international specialists such as Eugenio Carmona, Cécile Debray, Tamar Garb, Jèssica Jaques Pi, Patricia Leighten and Robert Lubar, among others, with a view to surveying Picasso’s origins through a contemporary gaze.

This conference examines the historical relationship between colonialism, authoritarianism and fossil fuels from the spheres of ecological and energy humanities.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, the encounter Chile or Utopian Imagination: On Democracy as Aesthetics examines, across two days, the Andean country’s cultural practices developed today from memories of the dictatorship.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, this conference addresses the language of Chilean arpilleras (burlap works), an exercise of reflection, denouncement and memory developed by groups of women in the dictatorship years. The activity is structured around a conversation on Conflict Textiles’ collection of arpilleras conducted by its founder Roberta Bacic and researcher Marina Vinyes; a symbolic handover ceremony of a series of five Conflict Textiles arpilleras acquired by the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation in 2023; and, as a coda, an arpilleras workshop led by Pilar López and Roser Corbera from the arpilleras group of the Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc (Badalona).

This instalment centres on the work of draughtsman and cartoonist Chris Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 1967), one of the pre-eminent names in independent comics. Ware will also take part in a conversation and encounter with Carla Berrocal, Enrique Bordes and Raquel Jimeno.

Following the tide that swept through the streets during the 8M Strikes in 2018 and 2019, linked to the resurgence of a feminist internationalism, in April 2019 a hundred or so people gathered in a space in Madrid to debate the situation facing the movement. A year later, the conversation continued in Barcelona, with double the number of participants. Both encounters set out the need to delve deeper into new feminist debates from a non-identity, inclusive and diverse perspective, forming the grounds for the publication Alianzas rebeldes [Rebel Alliances] (Bellaterra, 2021).

This conference revises the present and past of aerial war by way of three case studies conducted by researchers and creators linked to history, photography, architecture and medicine.

Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation.

This third edition is articulated around the artistic and discursive trajectory of Tim Etchells and his work with Forced Entertainment, a collective founded in Sheffield, England, in 1984 and made up of Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells as artistic director.

Developed by Fundación Gabeiras, Legacies. Spaces to Preserve Contemporary Creations is a project which seeks to analyse the situation of artistic legacies in the Spanish State from a social and legal perspective. It comes into being with the aim of drawing up a legal report to put forward solutions to a widespread problem of neglect in a state-wide context: the precarity of senior artists and safeguarding their contemporary legacies.

Chile or Utopian Imagination is a programme of activities which gathers film, textile and community art, critical thought and poetry to explore memory in relation to the project of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government, the coup d’état and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile by way of the work of different artists and thinkers.

This session, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets out to explore the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. The activity looks to reflect on the difficulty, and urgency, of imagining a world after, or beyond, tourism, with the programme comprising a compendium of brief lectures and a subsequent presentation of specific case studies by architecture and urbanism teams involved in re-wilding environments affected by tourism exploitation.

This latest edition includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter.

This fresh edition of the LGBTIAQ+ programme looks to explore the possibility of imaginatively and politically turning around the logics of hate and fear that run through us, socially raising questions around who personifies a non-normative sex-gender or body position.

The exhibition Machinations traces the influence of the machine concept developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in contemporary art within the context following May ’68 in France. Pivotal to putting together the show has been the research work of a scientific committee made up of philosophers Gerald Raunig and Stevphen Shukaitis and cultural theorist Brigitta Kuster. In this round-table discussion, moderated by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, each guest will present their research. 

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges. This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience.

In her recent publications, art historian and curator Antonia Majaca has focused her research on the relations between the development of algorithmic computing regimes and their potential to build subjectivity. This lecture sees Majaca analyse the historical construction of optical regimes found at the root of Western cosmologies in studies on how the history of Western geology has been shaped, considering that such regimes of the gaze are found at the base of contemporary computational paradigms.

This lecture by Enzo Traverso pivots around his latest book Revolution. An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021) in which he addresses the genealogy of the “revolution” concept and its multiple uses, giving rise to dialectic constellations from intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Aleksandra Kolontái and Auguste Blanqui and exploring the connection between their lines of theory and the existential realities they were developed within, and without averting the gaze from the aesthetic expressions that emerged in parallel with these revolutions, in addition to their relationship with time, oscillating incessantly between past and future, memory and utopia.

In its fifth edition, the Neighbourhood Picnic transforms, once again, the Museo Reina Sofía, turning it into a space of encounter, enjoyment and resistance for all residents of Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Bachelor’s Degree in Art at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum.

In this lecture, Equatoguinean writer, intellectual and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo traces a literary journey on the history of Equatorial Guinea, from the era of Spanish colonisation to its independence and subsequent evolution towards an authoritarian regime and its experience of diaspora.

This edition of Documents surveys the lesser-examined side of Pablo Picasso: as a poet. The visual, sound and performance quality of his poetry is deepened in the dialogue between text, sound and image, elements that form the backbone of the activity, structured around a performance recital of a selection of poems — with a new Spanish translation by Jèssica Jaques Pi — followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an editor and expert in Picasso’s literary work, and members of the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.

The first civilian casualties of the first documented aerial attacks since the invention of aviation were recorded in 1912. In her work Unending Lightning, artist Cristina Lucas employs an audiovisual device to locate on a map and trace all aerial bombings that have caused the loss of civilian lives from that year to the present. 

This lecture sees Patricia Saldarriaga set out the premise that although zombies can be considered representatives of otherness, they can also be seen as a result of necropolitics.

Epiphyte is a project, nurtured by the cultural association Side Thinkers and directed by Vanesa Viloria, which investigates new forms of facing the eco-social crisis by observing the plant world as a way to learn of other ways of life, community and future. On this occasion, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Pollinating (Con)tact, a programme structured around two artistic proposals and two conversations with agents and professionals linked to environmental humanities, artistic creation, science and climate activism.

The Territorial Re-existences Lab is an encounter which, with Colombian researchers and activists Lavinia Fiori and Libia Grueso, and presented by Carmen Haro and moderated by Josimar Castillo and Elisa Fuenzalida from Redes por el clima (Networks for Climate), aims to pool the strategic visions, conceptual tools and narratives to deal with the climate crisis.

Anthropologists Francisco Ferrándiz and Rossana Reguillo engage in dialogue on the presence of necropolitics as a form of managing death and administering life in different territories and landscapes: from modern-day Mexico to Francoist Spain, passing through other places which, in being permanently subjected to extractivist violence, are known as sacrifice zones.