Activities

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.

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 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.

Participants will work together to create and produce a novel written collectively — customarily an individual endeavour — addressing not only the writing process but also other tasks such as editing, correcting and disseminating a text. By the same token, and in the form of a coda, the workshop will explore the performative nature of the collective novel with a public presentation in different spaces inside the Museo.

This round-table discussion on municipalist graphic art concludes the programme of this new edition, following an initial creative workshop conducted by Enrique Flores and held from 10 to 12 November 2021.

This creative workshop, conducted by illustrator Enrique Flores, revolves around the concept of “illustrated journalism”, a way of narrating the present from illustration. It has been set up to carry out a sketched chronicle of daily life inside the Museo, conceiving it as a living institution which is permeable to the city and with myriad activities that stretch beyond regular visits.

This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions.

On the basis that humour is never neutral, as well as its capacity to question the established order and work as a powerful normalising force, this encounter interrogates supposedly humorous images which instead instil prejudice and normalise stereotypes.

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. 

This new edition analyses the presence of architecture in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive, a repository of memory containing, in fragments, the history of the institution: its origins as a hospital of neoclassicism, its role during the Spanish Civil War as a field hospital, its transformation into an art centre and its expansion as an international museum. Various landmarks that enable a micro history of civil and public architecture to be traced from the 18th century to the present day, but without losing sight of the process of configuration and the idea of what a museum must be.

This new edition analyzes the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles — directed by poet Abdellatif Laâbi, it brought together the most relevant voices in poetry, art and thought from post-colonial Maghreb from 1966 until it was banned at the beginning of 1972.

The Documents programme, which explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice, pays homage in this edition to Guy Schraenen (1941–2018).