Activities

Continuing with the same strand of independent comics, and previous instalments devoted to Chris Ware and Julie Doucet, this edition of Documents is centred on the work of Daniel Clowes (Chicago, 1961), a key point of reference in contemporary comic books. On this occasion, Clowes will also participate in an encounter with Rubén Lardín.

Thinking about the World from Art and Science is an activity organised by the Museo Reina Sofía to present the CNIO Arte project, an initiative run by the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicos (the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre), which has combined contemporary art and science since 2018. The project seeks to spark dialogue between international scientists and artists to explore common territories and to produce work from this conversation.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian Griselda Pollock to speak at its annual programme of master lectures, which reflects upon the historiography of art and its limits and vanishing points.

This fresh instalment examines an unexplored side of Joan Miró’s career: his poetic pursuit and the influence of poetry on his work. Therefore, the activity comprises a round-table discussion, conducted by specialists Olvido García Valdés, María González Menéndez and Carlos Martín García, and is centred on the analysis of a poetic text written by Miró, regarded as a possible manifesto of his artistic work. 

Esta actividad convoca a Eileen Myles, una de las voces más singulares de la poesía contemporánea y figura internacional de la literatura LGTBQI+, en un encuentro que toma forma de recital y conferencia, y que cuenta con la participación de la periodista Nerea Pérez de las Heras a cargo de la lectura del manifiesto I Want a President (1992) de la artista Zoe Leonard.

The sixth edition of Art and Tourism Imaginaries, an encounter series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets forth a study which explores the phenomenon of postcards and their impact on shaping the themes and stereotypes which have formed the collective imaginary of geographies, peoples and consumer habits in contemporary visual culture.

Ecologies of Utopian Desire, held inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, welcomes draughtsman and writer Miguel Brieva, who, across his career, has created a realm from which to imagine ecologically desirable worlds. Brieva is joined by researchers Julia Ramírez-Blanco and Alberto Berzosa to reflect, in conversation, on how to dream of better worlds, with an awareness of the political agency of these dreams and their viability and ideology.

Memoria queer y las políticas del archivo es el primer seminario en España del proyecto europeo Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives [Colecciones perversas: construyendo los archivos queer y trans de Europa], del que el Museo Reina Sofía es socio junto con otras instituciones culturales. Este encuentro reúne a activistas, archivistas e historiador+s para debatir el surgimiento, la historia y las políticas de los archivos queer y trans en el Estado español y el sur europeo.

This encounter, organised inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, sets out two sessions centred on incorporating environmental perspectives into the field of cultural studies, with an emphasis on situated research in an Iberian context. As a result, Adrián Almazán, Germán Labrador and Jaime Vindel will engage in conversation with researchers Jaume Franquesa and Iñaki Prádanos.

Inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, science and environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz reflects, alongside Adrián Almazán, the Seminar’s co-mobiliser, on global energy transformations in recent years and the need to adopt a critical perspective regarding models of ecological transition.

Once again, for another year, the Museo Situado assembly invites all residents and communities from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood to pervade the Museo Reina Sofía, inhabiting its spaces and transforming its Garden at the Neighbourhood Picnic. In short, a chance to encounter, celebrate and vindicate the struggles, rights and desires that mobilise them every day.    

Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) via its Bachelor’s Degree in Art and aims to promote, annually, an in-person encounter which intersects and establishes a dialogue between university and museum. The space, geared towards training artists, seeks to contribute to creating an expanded and connected community of student creatives and researchers, and is linked to the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre.  

With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau.

This public programme explores, via lectures, drifts, encounters and performances throughout the month of June, one of the main strands in the Museo Reina Sofía’s temporary exhibition season: the return of materiality. The exhibitions Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question and Eva Lootz. Making as if Wondering: So What Is This? all share references to the affective, speculative and spiritual capacity of matter.

How I Would Gaze in Wonder. Imagination and Ordinary Beauty is the title of a new encounter by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores the daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint. This fresh edition looks to address the power of imagination in daily life, beauty as method and imaginative methodologies to invoke futures that are already here and pasts still to be discovered.

A medida que transitamos desde la adquisición del conocimiento a través de los libros hacia la creciente influencia de la inteligencia artificial (IA), el panorama del ingenio humano está cambiando. Al explorar la nueva atención de los sistemas de IA como ChatGPT y los generadores de imágenes, este diálogo entre Mercedes Bunz y Oier Etxeberria reflexiona sobre lo que significa "calcular" significados y cómo da forma al enfoque de la tecnología hacia nuestro mundo.

Feminist and anti-racist political scientist Françoise Vergès (Paris, 1952) gives a lecture on the relationship between the massacre of the Palestinian people and the history of Western democracies built on colonialism, and thus on the genocide of indigenous peoples, extraction, exploitation and destruction of the environment.

Through art, the intention of this program is to create collective spaces for critical reflection on the current complex geopolitical scenario, as well as to support Palestinian artists and curators in connecting their struggles and experiences with international solidarity networks.

El programa Documentos está dedicado a las relaciones entre el arte y la actividad editorial, abordando temas como los efectos del archivo en las narraciones de la historia del arte, el libro de artista o la edición como práctica artística. Esta entrega está dedicada al trabajo de Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), autora fundamental en la evolución del cómic underground norteamericano de finales del siglo XX, que participa en un encuentro con Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz y Camille Vannier.

Lecturer and researcher Ann Rigney is a key reference point within contemporary memory studies, conducting research that is situated at the intersections of prose, collective identity and the elusive past.

Durante los años 2022 y 2023, en colaboración con el equipo de Museo en Red (hoy renombrado Museo Tentacular), La Laboratoria participó en el Nodo crítico Investigaciones Militantes de Tejidos conjuntivos, el Programa de Estudios Propios del Museo Reina Sofía. Simultáneamente impulsó y acompañó una serie de estancias donde distintos colectivos, investigador+s y artist+s problematizaron cuestiones muy diversas enfocadas desde la investigación militante como una práctica política que genera conocimiento colectivo. En la tela de araña es un programa de dos jornadas, que incluyen varias conversaciones y una pieza escénica, a modo de culminación de este proceso de investigación y creación.

Ghanaian artist, curator and cultural manager Ibrahim Mahama gives a lecture in the Museo, running through his professional career and exploring the continuities between academic research, artistic creation and current curatorial strategies to reconsider the transformative role of art from the Global South. The lecture is part of the Curatorial Practices Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue.

This encounter sets forth a journey through the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The tour, conducted by curator Manuel Borja-Villel, punctuates aspects that make Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) a key artist for the present and culminates in a poetry recital — selected and read by Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann and Victoria Pradilla — on the relationships between the Catalan artist and poetic writing. 

How to rewrite and recount history when its fragments are not in archives? How to tell marginalised, invisible, and even non-imagined stories? These are among the questions that steer Daniellis Hernández Calderón’s search through the visual arts. 

Through poetry, the moving image and debate, the programme looks to expand social awareness and promote civic commitment in support of robust, effective and urgent measures for the eco-social crisis we are currently facing. The scheduled activities are laid out according to the four laws of ecology formulated by Barry Commoner, a North American biologist and activist.

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

The 25th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 7 and 8 March 2024. 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 encounter sees choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972), alongside Lola Hinojosa, expand her reading of Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war dance piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and the point of reference for the exhibition Reconstrucción de una danza macabra (Reconstruction of a Macabre Dance), a new stage production framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fissures programme. The encounter will be followed by the unveiling of the show.

Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network, Archives of the Commons is a bi-annual encounter which arises from the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces where memories gestate and are cared for. The aim is to open up opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as sounding out experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, exercises of imagination and critique which are key to articulating and constructing narratives of memory in resistance.

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.