Seminars and Critical Nodes

Forms of Culture

Research conducted around practices, processes, products and languages in collectively building formalizable knowledge from the philosophy of design and with TCC (Think+Construct+Communicate) methodologies. Work which fosters an emancipatory and collective participation design by way of minimum reproducible devices is at the heart of this Seminar’s concerns. Coordinated by Pablo Jarauta (European Institute of Design), this group of researchers and designers will focus on the projective study of forms in the cultural sphere.

Literature and Social Imagination

The focal point of this Seminar is literature, socially and historically situated, as conflicting production. From such premises, literary forms are understood not simply as spaces of representation but as laboratories serving political imagination and the collective desires of an era. Therefore, literature as an interposed construction from different institutions, and from literary history, demonstrates its importance in fights for legitimacy and collective participation. The Seminar is set in motion by David Becerra, Raquel Arias and Carolina Fernández Cordero (philologists from the Autonomous University of Madrid, UAM).

Language, Power and Capital

A field of educational knowledge in which the conflictive intersections between language, institutions and speakers are found, and where language is a common good in perpetual dispute. Debates on political communication, new technology, neoliberalism, markets, norms, institutions, social change, culture wars and citizenship form the main lines of this Seminar conducted by Alberto Bruzos (Princeton University), Jorge Gaupp (Museo Reina Sofía), Luisa Martín Rojo (UAM) and Laura Villa (UAM).

Radical History

The focus here is the study of collective relationships with the past. Its landscape bears witness to forms of producing, disputing and sharing history in the context of the Spanish State, with its collapses, erasures and utopias. A critical vocation, with disciplinary challenges and political conversation, turns historiographic work into a dispute on the limits, origins and meanings of historical experience and collective agency, from an understanding of categories and archives through the expression of the future potency of pasts to be shared. The Seminar is articulated by historians Juan Andrade (Complutense University of Madrid, UCM), Carme Bernat (University of Valencia, UVA), Xavier Domènech (Autonomous University of Barcelona, UAB), Mónica Moreno (University of Alicante) and Pedro Oliver (University of Castilla La Mancha, UCLM).

Necropolitics, Aesthetics and Memory

A study of the historical links between aesthetics, resistance and political violence. The Seminar is organised in a dialogue with other research projects: the main one, coordinated by Oier Etxeberria (Tabakalera), Ana Teixeira Pinto (Universität der Künste, Berlin, Leuphana University, Lüneburg) and Germán Labrador (Museo Reina Sofía), accompanies the exhibition Evil Eye. A Parallel History of Optics and Ballistcs (Tabakalera) and centres on the study of technology and aesthetics in relation to colonialism, from the origins of drone perspectives. On the basis of this and other investigations under way (in the sphere of memory studies), the Seminar interrogates citizen forms of testimony, resistance and care confronting the history of modernity as an extractive alliance between states, elites and markets.

Iberian Cultural Studies

The aim of this Seminar is to conduct work around the confluence between cultural history and art and literary studies to consider the possibilities, methodologies and challenges of situated cultural studies. Therefore, it welcomes diverse research projects already under way which interrogate the intersections between work, gender, class, culture, utopia and community in Iberian contexts and beyond their limits. The complex relations between aesthetics and history, between politics and culture, citizenship and democracy, will be at the heart of these discussions. This space under construction is coordinated Germán Labrador (Museo Reina Sofía), María Rosón (UCM), Maite Garbayo (University of Barcelona, UB), Julia Ramírez (UB), Jaume Peris (UV) and María Ruido (UB), among others.

Black Iberian Studies

This proposal from Radio África seeks to blur the social imaginaries which have shaped Blackness in the Spanish State, questioning and fracturing grammars, stereotypes and the secular dehumanisation of the Black subject. At the present time, in awakening Blackness, there is the overriding need to incorporate new narratives in the public sphere. The absence of a reflection on Black presence and its resistance in Iberian spaces speaks of collective and institutional amnesia, when not complicit in racial capitalism and slave and colonial history. The plurality of the Black experience, inside and outside the territory of the archive, contrasts with its silence in the historical construction of Iberian States. Opposite this, there is a search for Blackness in material and oral archives, in historiography, the visual arts, literature, music and in popular culture to create a written and visual narrative allowing for the re-evaluation of its cultural contribution and the recognition and empowerment of Africans and people of African descent in the Spanish State. Tania Safura Adam, Edileny Tome da Mata, Kira Bermúdez and the research team from the Black Spain project will lead this pathway towards Blackness in the form of collective and situated research.

Rethinking the Museum

This questions the practice of the museum institution as an ideological and political device. The museum, and in particular the art museum, has historically been an affirmative space, a certain kind of narration, a certain type of practice and practitioner, and so on. Yet, far from its unequivocal operation, the museum is run in constituent ambivalence: between an organisation of hegemonic thought and a production space of other knowledge, multiple narratives and the experimentation of the Commons, configuring a unique space of human and non-human co-existence. It raises the questions: How does the institution abandon its affirmative place to work from interrogative frameworks? What institutional practice can be put forward in re-shaping the museum device, so determined historically and administratively? In short, can the museum evolve into a “sympoetic” organisation? Coordinated by Claudia Delso and Mabel Tapia (Museo Reina Sofía).

Research and Artistic Practice

A collective reflection on the forms of artistic production from the logics of research and the analysis of the intersection between aesthetics, advanced research and creative practices. The study of a repertoire of trajectories in which the relationship between research, academia and creative logics becomes structural in artistic formalisation, allowing for investigations from the relationships between research and creation in transfers, alliances and uniqueness. The Seminar is coordinated by the artists Matteo Locci and Patricia Esquivias.  

Live Arts and Critical Practices

In collaboration with the research and performative creation group ARTEA and the research project by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation directed by Fernando Quesada (The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices of Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene), the Museo welcomes, annually, a research group centred on thinking about the relationships between bodies, territories and conflicts. In the current edition, entitled Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, coordinated by Isabel de Naverán (Azkuna Zentroa and Museo Reina Sofía), a series of six work sessions is carried out between 20 December 2022 and 26 January 2023. These sessions work on the perspective of situated ecology and from the link between body and species, from the thread tying together the collective experience of mourning as a sensitive demand opposite the current landscape of climate disaster. The Node will be complemented with activities from the Expanded Theatricalities Chair held in the spring of 2023.

Environmental Studies

From the last quarter of 2022 onwards, the Museo will welcome a series of environmentally oriented activities, twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige. The historical importance of the environmental vector in understanding Spanish developmentalism is the subject matter of a series of activities to be held in the spring of 2023. Equally, the political responses to the global environmental crisis are considered in an international seminar coordinated by Fundación de los Comunes (Foundation of the Commons), under the title Capitalocene Utopias. This Node is completed with a series of live music events, a documentary exhibition in Space D of the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre (Cards on the Table. The Memory of Nunca Máis and Stacked Political Cards) and the fourth edition of the Aníbal Quijano Chair on decolonial thought, directed by Rita Segato and organised around the question: Can we be ecological under an extractive episteme?

Critical Sociology

In May 2023, the Sociología Ordinaria collective will organise the eleventh edition of the Encounter of Ordinary Sociology, a forum which brings together multiple approaches to the cultural and political critique of popular and subaltern social forms. The question of taste in relation to the violation of social norms and from the complex and disruptive vector of profanity encourages innovative formats of academic participation that turn this forum into a place of encounter with researchers of critical sociology. It establishes a space coordinated by Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) researchers Elena Casado, Amparo Lasen, Rubén Blanco and Antonio García.

Dissident Bodies

From the working line on LGTBIQ+ in contemporary culture, the Museo welcomes initiatives of research and activation which, under forms yet to be defined — reading group, performance, seminar and public conversation — call into question the place of bodies, their vulnerability, their strangeness, their commitment and their desire. This Node, coordinated by Jesús Carrillo (Autonomous University of Madrid, UAM), deals with the violence, complexities and contradictions of the present from listening to multiple bodies, acting as a platform and speaker of struggling bodies from the pandemic era.

Situated Thought

At the beginning of the summer of 2022, the Museo welcomed The Chair of Situated Thought. De-Constituent: Practices and Imaginaries to Come, directed by Ileana Diéguez (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México, campus-Cuajimalpa) and Ana Longoni (University of Buenos Aires). The nomadic nature of this forum allows it to be accommodated in a different Latin American context every year to gauge citizen struggles in each place and from there to weave political alliances with attuned collectives. Thus, slowly and surely, the field of situated thought emerges, an experimental territory lying between artistic practice, militant action and emancipatory thought and which traces, in public and institutional spaces, a cartography of struggles and networks of resistance. The events linked to this Node are streamed online. In September 2023, a series of activities will be held in connection to the memory of Salvador Allende’s Government fifty years later.

Militant Research

For the spring of 2023, the Museo en Red team, in collaboration with Fundación de los Comunes (Foundation of the Commons), La Laboratoria and the Institute of Radical Imagination, will put forward a space of training and research around the specific nature of forms of militant research. This research takes place in activist projects associated with independent practices of organisation and through the development of liberated tools and methodologies, beyond academia, the state and the market. A latticework of collaborators and people-in-residence from the Museo’s different networks interchange experiences and knowledge in crossed conversations.

Older Legacies

Driven by Fundación Gabeiras, the Museo holds a series of study sessions on artists’ legacies in the context of ageing. The issue of age gives rise to multiple political, cultural and anthropological challenges from their links to archive, heritage, well-being, universal basic income, demographic imagination and the cultures of care. These sessions are part of a broader framework of research and public intervention with which the Museo collaborates.

Meso-American and Caribbean Circulations

Aware of the need to interrogate, from the Museo, seemingly invisible cultural spaces, this Node seeks to place value on the historical and artistic legacies of Central American and Caribbean countries, considered part of a formidable cultural continent, to which Spanish institutions and audiences have paid little attention. The patent cultural and (post)colonial links that cross through comings and goings between the peninsular and circum-Caribbean, the question around indigenous nations or Afro-Caribbean cultures, and the intensive flow of diasporic, resistance-based, transcultural, and climatic exchanges enliven a programme comprising a series of activities and events.

The Guattari Dictionary

In conjunction with the exhibition Machinations (31 May – 28 August 2023), different events are welcomed with links to machined political thought: forms of film work, art and political action in complex spheres such as mental health, anti-colonial guerrillas, care and associative spaces. This Node is organised through a series of screenings, an encounter with researchers of the Machinations project and sessions devoted to a study on the work of Félix Guattari.

Research Projects on Wikipedia

With the collaboration of Carolina Espinoza, across the 2022–2023 academic year, the Museo sets up a work team to develop projects in collaboration with Wikimedia España. Those interested can join this group with objectives that include self-training as wikipedians, the development of Wiki working methodologies in the Museo, and publishing and the development of encounters among wikipedians.

From Malaise

Organised by Entrar Afuera, Locus* (Nada Colectivo) and Museo en Red, this Critical Node puts forward a framework of research on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a collective practice of communication. The confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of the structural malaise rooted in the capitalist system. Across five sessions, the Node explores the ways of living and facing contradictions inside and outside institutions, from first-person experience, artistic practice, institutional work and activism.