Activities

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre bring forward World Book Day to 21 April to participate in the BookCrossing initiative of other Spanish museums and cultural centres. The initiative is about “freeing” a series of books in different public spaces, in this case in the Museo and its surrounding areas. Anyone can take these books home to, once read, repeat the action.

Anthropologists Francisco Ferrándiz and Rossana Reguillo engage in dialogue on the presence of necropolitics as a form of managing death and administering life in different territories and landscapes: from modern-day Mexico to Francoist Spain, passing through other places which, in being permanently subjected to extractivist violence, are known as sacrifice zones. 

Situated outside academic frameworks, these investigations pick up the legacy of workers’ co-research from the 1960s, feminist epistemologies and theories of research-action. Therefore, more than establishing a method, they seek to generate devices in order for social struggles to read each other and find causes that lead to action. 

In conjunction with the exhibition Margarita Azurdia. Margarita Rita Rica Dinamita, this encounter explores the Central American artist Margarita Azurdia’s (Guatemala, 1931–1988). The encounter in the Museo comprises a tour through the exhibition, led by its coordinator Beatriz Jordana, interweaving voices and echoes superimposed in the different rooms of the show, a selection of the artist’s poems chosen by the show’s curator.

Queer L.E. The First Queer Literature Encounter is a transversal programme which addresses issues that cross and shake transfeminisms and queer lives, advocating the sharing of a space and time of common reading, thinking and debate. The sessions are articulated from different places such as prose, research and critical thinking, a juncture for words to transcend books and reach bodies around a community of readers, activists, writers and LGTBIAQ+ people.

This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.

A number of pre-eminent film-makers like Jean Vigo, François Truffaut and Abbas Kiarostami have made films about childhood, but few have forged such a coherent body of work as Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007). Keko, a peerless film-maker who made eleven fictional features between 1972 and 1984 in Albania, explored the challenges, frustrations and aspirations of children. This retrospective, the first in Spain and one of the few organised internationally, includes four of her — recently restored — films, screened in double sessions.

This TIZ addresses the problem areas that approach ecology from relationality. Interactions, relations of intimacy and mutual support, forms of collective intelligence, shared knowledge, involvement in protesting against climate change and community learning are some of the concepts that define the activities, activations, investigations and accompaniments from April through to July in the Museo.

This fresh edition of Interval presents El agua (Water, 2022), a feature film by Elena López Riera (Spain, 1982), accompanied by Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), a short film on the ritual and attraction of daily rural life. López Riera, with a filmography straddling gruesome realism and magical thinking, has established herself as one of the most original voices in new Spanish cinema. 

Inside the Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023 programme, and in one unique session, Guernica: el último exiliado (Guernica: The Last Exile) is screened, a documentary film centred on the iconic mural’s arrival in Spain seven months after the coup d’état attempt in 1981. In this instance, it is presented by its director, Guillermo Logar, and features a conversation with Genoveva Tussell and Álvaro Martínez-Novillo.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

In recent months, citizen demonstrations have exposed the dismal situation felt, for a number of years now, in the rooms of hospitals and medical centres across the Spanish State: public healthcare is in danger. Its clear demise, resulting from the progressive neglect of the country’s public authorities since the economic crisis in 2008, has intensified since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately damaging the pillars of a public model recognised the world over.

Project 30. Sketches of Heights is a site-specific performance which reflects, through a collective footprint and oral storytelling, on the memory of women during Franco’s dictatorship. It stems from research — conducted in Madrid during July of 2022 — into thirty women who explored the body at once as a wound and as a territory of resistance.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ongoing programme of film premieres, Intervals, shows recent works made either during the year in progress or the previous one. This fresh edition is devoted to Charlotte Wells (Scotland, 1987), 2022’s standout film-maker for her debut feature Aftersun (2022), a beautiful and melancholy reflection on family relationships, the real and imaginary dimension of memories and the passing of time.

In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, 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 structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.