Activities

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

The Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is a research initiative by Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Banco Santander and YGBArt (Rosina Gómez-Baeza and Lucia Ybarra). Conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, its purpose is to engage in a critical diagnosis of the Spanish art scene, viewed from a variety of standpoints and bringing together many different voices.

The Open Research Zone Subtramas is a series of activities programmed in connection with an art research project exploring the processes and methodologies involved in collaborative audiovisual creation. The program features a review of past experiences, from the 1970s up through current practices. In all of them, images take part in the formation of symbolic spaces that are conducive to the collective production of emotions, subjectivities and autonomous forms of relationality.

This collection offers a broad vision of how some of the audiovisuals now being made in Spain and produced outside of the industry are responding to today's situation of change and structural crisis. It also shows how documentary images constitute one of the most lively spheres for formal experimentation and essay film in the new systems of production and distribution.

El Periférico de Objetos is a theatre group with a dramaturgical style capable of conjuring up the trauma, fear and collective unconscious of the Argentine dictatorship. With both the doll and its manipulator playing a prominent role, its dramatic works, in allusion to Antonin Artaud, Witold Gombrowicz or Heiner Müller, explore the return and liberation of a repressed body. This performance reflects the importance of El Periférico and engages in a dialogue with the exhibition Losing the human form.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

Inspired by the tragic event that took place 75 years ago, Guernica is much more than a work of art. It has become a universal statement on the massacre. This condition, a synthesis of avant-garde pursuits and political engagement, has had a great influence not only on the visual arts but also on literature. The poetry reading, given in front of the painting by the writer Bernardo Atxaga (Guipúzcoa, 1951), includes poems by Luis Cernuda and Paul Éluard and traces the impact that the mural by Pablo Picasso has had on the written word.

Eric Andersen (Antwerp, 1940) has been linked to Fluxus from practically the very beginning. In 1962, he had the idea of organising a festival in Copenhagen's Nikolai Church. Before that he was involved in setting up art-poetry networks throughout Europe. His participation in this Festum Fluxorum, as the most public and festive qualities of Fluxus were known, was the beginning of a long collaboration in an array of Fluxus events that continue to this day.

In his 1936 essay, The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin uses the Blaue Blume—the romantic incarnation of unobtainable desire—to signify the artifice and perceived immediacy of film made possible through the concealment of the cinematic apparatus.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that reflect the various facets of contemporary musical creation.

Fluxus to the People is a program of concerts, activities, guided tours, lectures and also a documentary exhibition, all of which explore the imagination of the collective, the idea of art as a community tool and the process of de-specialization of the artist figure that is at the heart of the Fluxus movement. This program has consciously been given the format of a festival. First of all, it defends the playful, participatory and even burlesque nature of many of the avant-garde manifestations from 1960 onwards. Secondly, it explores new ways of approaching contemporary art from public activity.

Once again the Museum is collaborating with Mov_s, an event directed by professionals of the moving arts, dance and contemporary creation. On this occasion the Museum provides a space in which to reflect on operations in the area of dance in Latin America today, and to share lines of thinking and experiences.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.