
Held on 15 Jun 2019
1969 es el nombre de esta serie de sesiones con dj’s, concebidas tanto para la escucha como para el baile, con las que el Museo Reina Sofía conmemora los cincuenta años de salsa, una música mestiza con raíces africanas que no es mambo, ni chachachá, ni guaracha, ni guaguancó, ni pachanga, ni plena, ni bomba, ni tampoco son montuno, pero que es todas esas músicas caribeñas a la vez: un cúmulo de estilos aglutinados por la segunda generación de músicos latinos residentes en Estados Unidos en las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Su desarrollo e instrumentación fue sin embargo fruto de muchos años y varios países, además, por supuesto, de las aportaciones de músicos como Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Arsenio Rodríguez o Tito Puente.
A finales de los sesenta, los géneros musicales cubanos como el chachachá o el mambo fueron dando paso al boogaloo, la pachanga, el jala jala y el shing-a-ling. En 1969 este conglomerado musical inunda el barrio neoyorquino de East Harlem, renombrado por sus habitantes como “El Barrio”. Cabe destacar su situación, tan solo a ocho kilómetros en línea recta de la calle 19, donde Tony Schwartz había realizado su audio-documental sobre los migrantes puertorriqueños en 1955, y a unos quince del Lower Manhattan, lugar donde floreció a partir de 1961 lo que los historiadores del arte neoyorquinos llamarían las segundas vanguardias o artes expandidas que, además de llenar páginas y galerías, definió el papel del arte en la ocupación del suelo, dando pie al modelo más conocido de gentrificación urbana. En esa misma ciudad, en esa misma década, la salsa se convirtió en la sustancia de cohesión de movimientos artísticos y sociales como el de los puertorriqueños Young Lords Party.
La experimentación sonora, al igual que en el vecino Lower Manhattan, pasó por la transdisciplinariedad y mezcla de influencias traídas de ultramar, en este caso desde el Caribe. Es especialmente interesante el proceso de combinación de patrones rítmicos procedentes de distintas tradiciones centroamericanas cuya clave musical tiene su origen en los ritmos afrocaribeños. Este patrón, de 3/2 en lugar de 4/4, se encuentra en el mambo o la guaracha, y también en algunas tradiciones africanas, pero está ausente en toda la tradición europea. Así pues, el desarrollo de la composición polirrítmica es uno de los elementos más importantes en esta música que logra consolidar y encriptar diferentes testimonios migratorios y de mestizaje.
Las sesiones de 1969, como celebración conmemorativa de aquel espíritu, ofrecerán una selección de todos los estilos que conformaron lo que hoy entendemos por salsa, en su momento un nombre elegido aleatoriamente que sirvió como herramienta de posicionamiento identitario y comercial.
Con el apoyo técnico de
Laboratorio de Informática y Electrónica Musical-LIEM, Centro de Tecnología del Espectáculo-CTE, Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música-INAEM
Comisariado
José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Con el patrocinio de

Participants
La Parcería, de la que proceden los dj’s protagonistas del evento, es una asociación cultural fundada en 2010 como plataforma para el libre tránsito de propuestas, discursos, ideas, saberes y haceres artísticos con impacto social. La Parcería creó Salsódromo Madrid, un proyecto de investigación, difusión y preservación de las manifestaciones populares y culturales afrocaribeñas por medio de la escucha y el baile, surgido en el verano de 2012 como medio de cohesión social ante la falta de un plan de integración y acogida a las comunidades latinas migrantes en España. Salsódromo nació en el Campo de la Cebada, donde la salsa ayudó a recuperar una parte del espacio del barrio y, junto con ella, la identidad de varias comunidades migrantes. Hoy permanece vivo en los martes de Salsa en el Café Berlín.
Más actividades

Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.

CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?

Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 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.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.

The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?

TEJA 2026. Open Call for Emergency Art Residencies
Proposal submission until 12 January, 2026
TEJA / Red de espacios culturales en apoyo a situaciones de emergencia [Network of Cultural Spaces in Support of Emergency Situations] has the mission to promote transnational cooperation by offering temporary art residencies to artists and cultural practitioners who find themselves in complex socio-political situations in their countries of origin. During their stay in Spain, residents receive accommodation, legal and psychological counseling, and access to a network of organizations and professionals with whom they can share, develop, and continue with their creative projects. The goal is to provide a safe and stimulating environment where artists can continue their work despite adverse circumstances and generate dialogue spaces that ensure freedom of expression through joint activities both in Spain and with international collaborators.
During 2026, TEJA hosts three new residencies, each lasting three months, dedicated to supporting artists and cultural practitioners residing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, in the second half of the year, TEJA hosts three additional residencies for Gazan artists, which are offered by invitation (as Spain is currently unable to facilitate evacuations from Gaza, these invitations are coordinated through France). These residencies aim to provide a stable, creative environment and foster artistic exchange in the face of ongoing adversities. Through this new program, TEJA reaffirms its commitment to amplifying Palestinian voices and empowering artists as they navigate these turbulent times.
The selection is carried out by the TEJA network in close collaboration with each hosting partner. This year the hosting partners are: La Escocesa (Barcelona), hablarenarte / Planta Alta (Madrid), Espositivo (Madrid), Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), Casa Árabe (Córdoba). The selection prioritizes the artist’s personal and professional situation first, and then the alignment with the practices and themes of the hosting spaces. Proposal submission deadline is January 12th, 2026, 23:59 h.




![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)