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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
Held on 28, 30 Oct, 01, 06, 08, 13, 15, 20, 22, 27, 29 Nov, 04, 06, 11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 27 Dec 2014; 03, 08, 09, 10, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29, 31 Jan, 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.
Más actividades
![Isabel Coixet, 100 Years and You Everywhere [100 años y tú en todos los sitios], 2026, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/2.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
John Berger and Isabel Coixet. Continued Ways of Seeing
Thursday, 17 September 2026 at 7pm
Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.
The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.
![Chantal Akerman, Woman Sitting after Killing [Mujer sentada después de matar], 2001, instalación. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/chantal-akerman-mujer-sentada-despues-matar.jpg.webp)
On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge
18, 19 SEP 2026
The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.
In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art.
Godard and Miéville: Time and Ruin
Friday, 18 September 2026 - 7pm
Inside the framework of the conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge, this film series sets forth three critical visions of the museum via three sessions featuring the works of John Berger, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ariella Azoulay, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker, Kwate Nee-Owoo, and the premiere of short films by Isabel Coixet and La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado). In classical theory, the museum gives the world meaning; it contains fragments of the past, granting them a history, a narrative that explains preterite time and the present. Today, there is an implicit assumption that this function hides and legitimises forms of power, yet what if the museum, instead of explaining the world, multiplied it through radical ideas, silenced periods and repressed subjects? Such is the approach of the film-makers and artists in this film season.
In 1972 the writer John Berger opened the landmark television series Ways of Seeing with an iconoclastic gesture: slicing Sandro Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars (1485) in London’s National Gallery. A transgressive act that recalls contemporary attacks on the museum by dissident youth and with which Berger, after revealing it was a reproduction, sought to ignite debate around the idea of an original artwork and a copy. In this, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first session pays homage to one of the great art writers of the twentieth century. Starting with a review of Berger’s audiovisual work by art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola, the series begins with the premiere of 100 Years and You Everywhere (2026), an unreleased short film by Isabel Coixet composed as a beautifully crafted letter to Berger, and continues with an analysis of fragments of Ways of Seeing in relation to the museum and contemporary art.
The second session screens two medium-length films by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville on time, ruin and museum. In The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century (1999), both film-makers consider what remains of that “old place”, the museum, at the close of a century of wars and totalitarianism, and ask whether it should be more of a legend or desire than a place. This same driving principle leads Godard to build his own imaginary museum in Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006), a rickety toy museum which, paradoxically, contains the great film-maker’s full power of thought on history and images.
Finally, the third session explores one of the major challenges of recent years: the decolonisation of the museum, the recognition of its link to imperialist discourses of power and the need to situate a new silenced or repressed subject at the centre of the Western narration of history. Under the title Museums and Restitution, it includes the film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), by theorist Ariella Azoulay, Statues Also Die, by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker (1953), Kwate Nee-Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and the first screening of the short film Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), by La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado), filmed at the Museo de América in Madrid.
![Ariella Azoulay, Un-documented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder [Indocumentados. Desaprendiendo el saqueo imperial], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/5.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
Museums and Restitution
Saturday, 19 September 2026 - 7pm
Centuries of plundering, decades of amnesia, years of living with unmitigated extractivist power… Does a museum, as we know it, have a raison d'être in a postcolonial society?
This session expounds the operations of the museum as a colonial machine, while putting forward ideas, in narration, for a more just, equal and inclusive institution of the future via society’s marginalised and minority voices. The session begins with the international premiere of Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), which presents a vision of the Quimbaya Collection (fifth and sixth centuries CE) from the Museo de América in Madrid. It is constructed with the voices and chants of Wayúu mourners and guides, not only as a way of reinstating the role of these gold idols — anthropomorphic figures of men and women used as vessels in ritual practices — but also to imagine that what must be exhibited is not the gold itself. It is the ritual’s own chant. In the classic film You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian film-maker Kwate Nee-Owoo accesses the British Museum’s collection of African art, located in the building’s basement, to question the meaning behind a museum plundering and nullifying. A fine exercise of first-person institutional critique screened for the first time in Spain. Almost seventy years since Resnais and Marker made Statues Also Die (1953), a reflection on the aura-bearing value of the museum opposite the identity-based and cultural belonging of African art, theorist Ariella Azoulay films the same statues again at the Musée du Trocadéro (today the Musée du Quai Branly), which survive and wait to be reunited with their people. Azoulay, whose wholly original undertaking is a lesson to the museum of the future, connects the forced migration of these sculptures with the mass transit of people crossing borders artificially imposed by the same system that has plundered their culture.
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation
From 21 to 24 September 2026
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation (S.T.I.L.O.) is a programme of joint learning and join strategy which sets in motion a process for the exchange of questions, methodologies and experiences between cultural organisations. The overall aim is to create, circulate and prototype tactics, tools and collective knowledge on institutional practices that open new channels for defending culture and advocating structural transformation in divergent geographical contexts.
The project is part of the Laboratorio de Institucionalidad Compartida (The Laboratory of Shared Institutionalism, LIC), a space for the Museo Reina Sofía’s research, work and advocacy centred on developing, experimenting with and systemising practices, protocols and tools which contribute to a fairer and more liveable cultural ecosystem.
For many years now, so-called infrastructural critique in museums questions material, legal and economic infrastructures, among others, as well as the forms of solidarity and practices required to sustain the cultural ecosystem. By approaching current debates, S.T.I.L.O. raises questions on the ways in which organisations define and interpret their practices, organise their relations and respond to the social contexts in which they operate.
The school gathers four cultural organisations that work via different institutional models – scale, contexts, conditions, different working models — with the goal of pooling common strategies and tools of organisation, advocacy and relationships with local communities.
The programme is conceived as a collaborative process with the participation of Arika, La Revuelta, BAK Basecamp and The Tentacular Museum (Museo Reina Sofía) and is structured around preparatory online sessions and an in-person seminar in Madrid.
S.T.I.L.O. is an activity framed inside the working strand of Situated Organisations from L'Internationale’s Museum of the Commons project, which reflects on the role of museums and art organisations as actors within complex social networks and ecosystems, with a view to exploring new ways to democratise institutions and make them more open, inclusive and useful.