Held on 24 feb 2022
The 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration and supported by MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 24 and 25 February 2022. As an international encounter it sets out to share and debate experiences and research, open new channels of study and reflect upon the institutional management of conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition is held in a virtual format via 20-minute contributions from speakers, followed by a five-minute Q&A session live with the audience. It features participation from universities, museums, art centres, and restorers’ associations, among others.
People who sign up will receive an email with instructions and a link to the online platform enabling them to follow and participate in the event.
- All talks with be streamed bilingually in Spanish and English.
- Questions will be taken at the end of each presentation via the chat.
- For any technical issues during the streaming, please contact: jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es
- Times will be synchronised with CET (Central European Time).
- An attendance certificate will be issued to people registered previously. This certificate must be requested via email by writing to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es from 26 February to 4 March.
Programme
Thursday, 24 February 2022
3:45pm Opening
4pm Presentation and welcome
Jorge García Gómez-Tejedor (head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration), Leyre Bozal (collections conservator in Fundación MAPFRE’s Culture Area) and Mayte Ortega Gallego (coordinator of the 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference)
4:15pm Reflecting Upon the (In)Visibility of the Conservator’s Creative Agency (in English)
Andreia Nogueira (Centro de Tecnologia, Restauro e Valorização das Artes - Techn&Art, from the Polytechnic Institut of Tomar - IPT, Portugal)
4:45pm Discovering a Mexican Suitcase: Characterising a Collection of Work by Pictorialist Photographer Hugo Brehme
Alejandra Nieto Villena (Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico). Co-authors: José Refugio Martínez Mendoza and Álvaro Solbes García (Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico), and Juan Cayetano Valcárcel Andrés (Polytechnic University of Valencia)
5:15pm Eugenio Granell’s Films Newly Preserved
Carolina Cappa (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastián)
Co-authors: Pablo Adiego, Amaia Badiola, Julia Cortegana de la Fuente and Borja Rodríguez Gimeno (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastián).
5:45pm Traditional Pigments in Contemporary Art: Enamel Blue
Patricia de los Reyes Félix (independent restorer)
Co-authors: Beatriz de los Reyes Félix and Marta Plaza Beltrán (Complutense University of Madrid)
6:15pm Presentation of the Work Group Contemporary Art and New Media. Monograph and New Projects from GE-IIC
Rita Amor García (The Spanish Conservation Group GE-IIC)
6:30pm Round-table Discussion. The Evolution of Creation and Documentation Processes in Complex Artworks. The Experience of Kinetic Artist Elías Crespín
Elías Crespín (artist), Jorge García, Carmen Muro, Mayte Ortega and Regina Rivas (Museo Reina Sofía)
—Moderated by: Arianne Vanrell (Museo Reina Sofía)
7:15pm Conclusions
Friday, 25 February 2022
3:45pm Opening
4pm A Paradigmatic Agreement to Conserve Art Stations in Naples. Case Study: Restoring Enzo Cucchi’s Work Untitled in the Salvator Rosa Underground Station
Giovanna Cassese (Accademia di Belle Arti, Naples)
Co-authors: Maria Corbi (Ufficio Patrimonio Artístico, Azienda Napoletana Mobilità - ANM, Naples) and Manlio Titomanlio (Accademia di Belle Art, Naples) and Alfreda Capone (student)
4:30pm Deploying Metal Soaps in Oil Painting. Experimental Methodology to Determine the Influence of Variable Relative Humidity
Marta Pérez Estébanez (Complutense University of Madrid)
Co-authors: Susanna Marras, Ruth Chércoles and Margarita San Andrés (Complutense University of Madrid) and María Antonia García (Cultural Heritage Institute of Spain)
5pm Study Methodology to Determine the Behaviour of Pen Inks Exposed to Radiation
Luis Erick Miraval Gómez (Complutense University of Madrid)
Co-authors: Ruth Chércoles Asensio, Marta Pérez Estébanez and Carmen Pérez González (Complutense University of Madrid), and Ramón J. Freire Santa Cruz (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
5:30pm The Textile Creations of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and Henriette Negrin. Their Conservation and Restoration
Silvia Montero (Museo Reina Sofía)
6pm Farewell and conclusion
Submission of Lectures (closed)
[dropdown]
The deadline for submitting lecture proposals ends on 21 November 2021. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es attaching the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to contemporary art conservation and restoration.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the addressed subject matter, which should be stated at the start of the document using a keyword.
- CV and contact details.
The proposals can be presented in Spanish and English and will be evaluated by a scientific committee, which will select the lectures to be presented during the conferences and will determine their possible inclusion in a subsequent publication, which in turn will undergo a second, and definitive, evaluation by the editorial committee.
For online presentations, participants must send their recording in accordance with the technical requirements they will receive upon notification of participation.
[/dropdown]
Collaboration
illycaffèSponsor
The MAPFRE Foundation
![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)
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
September, 2025 – May, 2026
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 two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.