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Conversationalists
Conversationalists A
October 28, 2014 - 6:30 p.m., Sabatini Building, Auditorium
What, How and for Whom (WHW), Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní, Virginia Villaplana) , João Fernandes and Jesús Carrillo discuss art as really “useful” knowledge.Participants
What, How and for Whom (WHW) is a curatorial collective founded in 1999. Based in Zagreb (Croatia), its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, curators of the Really Useful Knowledge exhibition.
Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní, Virginia Villaplana) is an art research project concerned with digital visual culture and collaborative production. Its members participate in the exhibition as artists and have devised the programme Action for Really Useful Knowledge and the itineraries of the exhibition’s mediation programme.
João Fernandes is the Deputy Director of Art at the Museo Reina Sofía.
Jesús Carrillo is the Head of Cultural Programmes at the Museo Reina Sofía and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Conversationalists B
November 20, 2014 - 7:00 p.m.
Contrabandos (the Independent Publishers Association of the Political Book) and the open and collaborative library Bookcamping engage in an open dialogue with the audience on the possibilities of publishing on the fringes of cultural industries.On the same day, at 4.40 p.m., both collectives will construct, with the help of those in attendance, a book “tree” on new political imaginaries. Location: Cuesta de Moyano, booth 20, Madrid.
Participants
Contrabandos is an independent publishers association focused on the promotion of texts and materials with a strong political and social focal point: Tierradenadie, Proteus, Hiru, Pol-len, Bellaterra, El Viejo Topo, Txalaparta, Ned, La Oveja Roja, Octaedro, Icaria, Laertes and Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo.
Bookcamping is an open and collaborative digital library for reviewing and downloading content in diverse formats. It aims to socialise reading and encourage a culture of sharing.
Conversationalists C
January 10, 2015 - 11:00 a.m.
Esta es una Plaza (Madrid), El Patio Maravillas (Madrid), La Casa Invisible (Málaga) and Observatorio Metropolitano de Barcelona will discuss the learning that emerges from socio-cultural experiences, politics and knowledge revolving around a new citizenship.Participants
Esta es una Plaza is an association set up around a public space, managed by local residents, where alternatives for outdoor leisure, exchange and socialisation are put forward.
El Patio Maravillas is a self-managed space located in the Malasaña neighbourhood of Madrid. It works towards a system of citizen participation and sets out to be a tool with which to build a new democracy. Different collectives are involved and offer diverse activities based on cooperation.
La Casa Invisible is a Social and Cultural Centre Managed by Citizens. Located in Málaga, it offers a space for cultural experimentation, training and new models of citizen management.
Observatorio Metropolitano de Barcelona is an open research group providing a critical analysis of urban commercialisation and the development of the public sphere in Barcelona.
Conversationalists D
January 22 enero, 2015 - 7:00 p.m.
Las Lindes (CA2M), the collective Cine Sin Autor and staff from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Department discuss the development of audiovisual prototypes in the spheres of education and creation.Participants
Las Lindes (CA2M) is a research and action group that works on ways of creating a new narrative of critical education practices, centring its research on education, art and cultural practices.
Cine sin Autor is a collective devoted to filmic art practices that sets out a new model of horizontal production for collective creation and without the authorship of film works.
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Narrators
Narrators A
January 17, 2015 - 7:00 p.m.
The research and artistic production collective Declinación Magnética considers action that highlights popular and illegitimate knowledge.Declinación Magnética is a research and artistic production collective made up of visual artists, theorists and curators. Its activity focuses on audiovisual production – between fiction and essay – as a tool for reflecting on the colonial past and present within the framework of the current global crisis.
Narrators B
January 16, 2015 - 7:00 p.m. Jam Session Body-to-Body Readings
January 23, 2015 - 7:00 p.m. Improper Acts
February 6, 2015 - 7:00 p.m. Workshop on the manufacturing of DIY happiness
somatecxs. Research/production group
n acciones. bodies, narratives and memories
Jam Session Body-to-Body Readings
Friday 16 January, 7 p.m.
Chto Delat RoomThe Jam Session is an act of readings, both interlocked and polyphonic, that follows an open score. It sets out from the idea that narrations are not limited to orality, meaning that the body and bodies are not just one theme to read and enter into dialogue about, but instead participate in the reading. Everyone attending this activity is invited to explore the space, bodies and words, or the absence of them.
Improper Acts
Friday 23 January, 7 p.m.
Subtramas RoomImproper Acts are the last words in an old conversation, a dialogic project through the choreography of gestures, actions, sounds and experiences that question the long and complex journey undertaken by the Museo Reina Sofía as disciplinary architecture. By understanding the bodies and spaces in the museum diachronically, improper acts and forms of presence are evoked from the primitive hospital complex which are alien to its current use as an arts centre, but nevertheless, form part of the normative genealogy that constructs the edifice and its memory.
Workshop on the manufacturing of DIY happiness
Friday 6 February, 7 p.m.
Subtramas RoomFaced with the question posed by the Subtramas collective, How do we activate our imagination to create happiness that differs from the one organised by capitalism? Somatecxs offers a do-it-yourself manufacturing workshop of devices and prostheses facilitating happiness that appeals to creative thought.
To register, please send an email to programasculturales2@museoreinasofia.es. If you think of any device or prosthesis manufacture, you can tell us. A good-mood viewfinder? A holiday-weather simulator? An affection dispenser? A noise or complaint attenuator? Gluten- and glucose-free happiness pills? The most colourful prototypes will be chosen and built collectively.
somatcxs is a project stemming from the Museo Reina Sofía programme of Critical Practices “Somatheque. Living and Resisting in the Neoliberal condition”, run by Beatriz Preciado, in what is an approach to the modern body as a political and cultural archive.
Narrators C
January 31, 2015 - 6:30 p.m.
Me acuerdo… is a memorial collective in which diverse feminist and queer groups narrate the conquests of sexual diversity rights and the political learning processes in recent decades in Spain.Coordinators
Fefa Vila, cultural manager, social researcher and coordinator in the Department of projects and research within the EU at the Fundación FOREM. Her work is developed around the construction of gender in present-day societies from critical feminist positions. She also currently forms part of the queer work group in Madrid.
Elvira Siurana, secretary for the Spanish Feminist Party, co-director of the Publishing House "Vindicación Feminista" and editor of the theorist publication “Poder y Libertad”.
Guest artist
Floy Krouchi is an artist and electroacoustic composer that experiments with the sounds and silences in the world.
With the participation of: Ada Vila, Ana Rossetti, Anna Mezz, Begoña Marugán, Begoña Pernas, Carmen Jiménez, Carmen Romero, Cipri Martín, Cris del Toro, Empar Pineda, Esther Ortega, Eva Corredera, Flor Martínez, Isabel Cadenas, Isabela Vázquez, Izaskun Sánchez, Lucas Platero, Nieves Salobral, Rocío Lleó, Susana Sánchez, Tere Maldonado, Teresa Labrador.
Narrators D
All Thursdays and Saturdays - 7:00 p.m.
Readings and interpretations of a selection of incident reports on surveillance and mediation, along with reports on complaints, suggestions and congratulations compiled by the Museo team. These actions make the social dynamic that takes place in the exhibition space visible through the collection of multiple voices that pass through the museum. The diversity of visitors’ attitudes and the role of the museum staff identify them as receptive and active agents in the exhibition process, always placing them at the centre of this experience. In each session, due to take place in different exhibition halls, a range of combinations and variations will be carried out on the texts by students from the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre. -
Instigators
Instigators A
January 17, 2015 - 11:00 a.m.
The collectives Cidespu, EnterArte and Acción educative, connected to the Marea Verde, carry out an intervention in defence of state education.Participants
Cidespu is an association of Citizens in Defence of Public Education in Móstoles (Madrid) that aims to safeguard the quality of public teaching in the local area.
Acción Educativa, made up of professionals from the sphere of education, works towards critical and creative education as a method of renewed teaching.
EnterArte is a work group comprised of teachers and an initiative that aims to bring art and schools closer together, introducing art education as an active learning method in the classroom.
Instigators B
December 14, 2014 First round: 11:00 a.m. Second round: 12:30 p.m.
MEDSAP-Marea Blanca from Madrid recount collective learning in their assertions in defence of public healthcare.MEDSAP (a Table in Defence of Public Healthcare in Madrid) is made up of a series of collectives and associations that uphold the defence of public healthcare and the active fight against the processes of privatisation in the Madrid healthcare system, demanding changes to the social and economic model.
January 8, 2015 - 6:30 p.m.
Yo SÍ Sanidad Universal (against healthcare exclusion and in favour of the collectivisation of knowledge) invites everyone to their monthly Agora , on this occasion about “Ethical and practical health”.Yo SÍ Sanidad Universal is defined as a movement of civil disobedience comprised of workers and patients from the National Healthcare system that demand universal health care and provide support for cases of healthcare exclusion.
Instigators C
November 22, 2014 - 7:00 p.m.
Eskalera Karakola. C/ Embajadores nº 52, Madrid.
The Possible care and domestic struggles workshop with the groups Senda de cuidados and Territorio Doméstico.Limited places. Further information and registration at: sendadecuidados@gmail.com
February 1, 2015 - 12:00 p.m.
The groups Senda de cuidados and Territorio Doméstico carry out an action for the social reorganisation of care.Participants
Senda de cuidados is a non-profit organisation aimed at building alternative decent work in the field of care. They use the idea of Cuidadanía, which in Spanish plays with the words Citizenship and Care, as they work towards building new lifestyles based on collective care.
Territorio Doméstico is made up of women from SEDOAC (Active Domestic Service), the Cita de Mujeres de Lavapiés group and the Agencia de Asuntos Precarios, who have found a space for sharing, analysing and proposing new forms of organisation among those that form part of domestic staff.
Instigators D
October 30, 2014 - 7:00 p.m.
María Laura Rosa holds an intervention on the artistic and activist practices (Argentina).María Laura Rosa is a researcher, teacher and specialist in art and gender. She is part of the research group “Women, politics and diversity in the ‘70s”, from the Interdisciplinary Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Buenos Aires, and the Argentinian Association of Art Critics.
February 4, 2015 - 7:00 p.m.
Edificio Sabatini, Sala Bóvedas
Acces through Calle Santa Isabel, 52
The group Península. Procesos coloniales y prácticas artísticas y curatoriales holds an activity on the critical questioning of colonial images.Limited seating. Registration in programasculturales2@museoreinasofia.es
Península is a debate platform on art, coloniality and curatorship related to Spanish and Portuguese history, their colonial processes and the latency of their power relations in the present.
Public action for Really Useful Knowledge
- Seminars and Lectures
- Workshop
- Encounter
Held on 28, 30 oct, 01, 06, 08, 13, 15, 20, 22, 27, 29 nov, 04, 06, 11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 27 dic 2014; 03, 08, 09, 10, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29, 31 ene, 01, 05, 06, 07 feb 2015
A programme of actions and activities within the context of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, devised by the collective Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana). These actions take place inside the galleries of the exhibition and feature participation from different social and cultural collectives.
The programme is made up of three types of actions, grouped under the name Conversationalists, Narrators and Instigators. Each typology encompasses actions linked, respectively, to the four questions that activate the mediation itineraries proposed by Subtramas: Why is learning together useful? (Route A), How do we activate our imagination to create happiness that differs from the one organised by capitalism? (Route B), What learning comes out of social movements? (Route C) and What can politically activate images? (Route D).
The Conversationalists present a series of conversations concerning the collective production of knowledge and experiences and their conflicts and effects.
The Narrators relate stories and text readings that compile a critical memory with the knowledge established.
The Instigators recount the conquests of social struggles via the strategies of representation used in present-day campaigns and citizen mobilisations.
The exhibition Really Useful Knowledge has been organised by the Museo Reina Sofía within the framework of the project “The Uses of Art” from the European network of museums L’Internationale.
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8, 22 OCT, 5, 19 NOV, 3, 17, 31 DIC 2025,14, 28 ENE, 11, 25 FEB, 11, 25 MAR, 8, 22 ABR, 6, 20 MAY, 3, 17 JUN 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
Rethinking Guernica
21, 28, 22, 29 SEP, 5, 12, 19, 26, 6, 13, 20, 27 OCT, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 3, 10, 17, 24 NOV, 7, 14, 21, 28, 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 DIC 2025
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.
![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
29 SEP, 2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
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 four sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes four 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; 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; and international law, through the work of British writer China Miéville.
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.