The Caribbean Relation
A Programme inside the Framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean
Ernesto Bautista, New promises, 2012
Date and time
Held on 07 Mar 2024
In The Caribbean Relation, the Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant. Moreover, the history of the Caribbean has demonstrated its capacity to transform the violence of colonisation into an amalgam of different influences and identities projected into the world via Caribbean diaspora.
By starting out from this subject, the Museo recovers the historical figure of experimental Puerto Rican film-maker José Rodríguez Soltero, reads and dances the writings of Cuban curator Tamara Díaz Bringas, and brings proceedings to a conclusion with a party/concert propelled by DJ Valerie Brathwaite, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and lives in Venezuela, and Toccororo, a Spanish woman with Cuban roots. In unison, it will re-open Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?, rooms in the Museo Reins Sofía Collection centred on post-colonial art and thought, to offer a wide-ranging exhibition programme with shows on Ulla von Brandenburg, Ibon Aranberri, Antoni Tàpies and Olga de Soto.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Activities
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From 7 to 23 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
The Films of José Rodríguez Soltero: Cuir/Queer Latinx
Film Series
TicketsThe Museo recovers through this film series the work of Puerto Rican artist José Rodríguez Soltero (1943–2009), a key figure of Caribbean diaspora and the New York underground in the 1960s and 1970s. Rodríguez Soltero belonged to the same generation and social context as Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, sharing film-making methods, with the relevance of his work obscured until the restoration of his only three conserved films Jerovi (1965), Lupe (1966) and Dialogue with Che (1968), all three of which are screened in this series.
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Saturday, 9 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400 and online platform
All Lives
Reading and Dancing the Texts of Tamara Díaz Bringas
Online platformThis encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. Through Díaz Bringas, writing is understood as a way of looking after ourselves, to be in the world through listening and mutual understanding. The texts gathered in Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024] are the pretext for celebrating, in this encounter, forms of making and the networks that the curator wove in her life, situated, across almost three decades, in the specific contexts and urgencies of Cuba, Central America and Spain.
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Saturday, 9 March 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 1
The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean
ARCOmadrid 2024 Party in the Museo Reina Sofía
The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Caribbean tides and currents, which flow through the Sabatini Building’s Garden and Cloister from 10pm until midnight as part of the ARCOmadrid 2024 closing party. Embracing the themes of this edition of the Madrid art fair, The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, DJ Valerie Brathwaite and Toccororo unfurl a sound-based connection between distant shores, and with influences and approaches that are as interesting as they are different.
Collectionn
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Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?
The Museo re-opens the rooms of the Collection centred on the 1990s, a period in which many of the changes that explain the current world order took place. In Spain, the events and celebrations of 1992 (Expo ‘92 in Seville, the Barcelona Olympic Games, Madrid as European Capital of Culture), six years after joining the European Union — in what was considered an example of a successful integration into modernity — reflected enthusiasm that concealed the weakness of an economic structure partly underpinned by a real estate bubble; its blowout in 2008 marked the beginning of the end of globalising euphoria.
Expo ‘92 in Seville was an event conceived to celebrate Spain’s categorical arrival into modernity and served to elucidate the light and darkness of Iberian colonial legacy, as well as enabling an analysis of the inherent relationship that exists between conquest and violence. Violence defined by extractivism, by the plundering of history and by the logics of colonialist dispossession, including the exploitation of resources and people, and conflicts of gender and race.
Exhibitions
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Until 10 March 2024 Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez
Ulla von Brandenburg
One-sequence Spaces
The work of artist Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974) is shaped by her early training as a stage designer and a brief stint in the world of theatre. For this exhibition the artist develops a series of textile installations which, as backdrops, can be crossed by openings, thereby blurring the limits between inside and outside. The textile geometric forms are shown alongside three films by the artist to accompany the visual work, expanding information, providing nuances and inviting the spectator to move through this new scenography of entwined spaces and histories.
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Until 11 March 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Ibon Aranberri
Partial View
TicketsThis anthological exhibition devoted to Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, 1969) assembles a selection of works spanning from the 1990s to the present, revisiting different projects and placing the stress primarily on the evolution of the artistic language he has employed across his career. Aranberri’s body of work is characterised by its incompleteness, and by generating materials and situations of different types which expand the artistic process. His practice encompasses the co-existence of documentary materials resulting from research processes with a corpus of images and sculptural forms which, seemingly veiled or inaccessible, establish a correlation between their abstract quality and the narrative materiality of documents.
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Until 24 June 2024 Sabatini Building, Floor 4
Antoni Tàpies
The Practice of Art
TicketsTo mark the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies have organised one of the most complete exhibitions on the artist to date, spanning over 220 works from museums and private collections from around the world to shine a light on his career arc from 1943 to 2012. Through the selected works, some of which have not been shown together for many years, this exhibition foregrounds the prolific career of Tàpies, resituating his work and influences in recent art history.
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Until 1 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Space 1
Olga de Soto
Reconstruction of a Danse Macabre
TicketsInside the framework of the Fissures programme, choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972) revisits and expands upon a research project undertaken over more than a decade ago on Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and one of the foundational works in the history of contemporary dance. With the project, De Soto endeavours to explore the lasting impact on audiences who have seen Der grüne Tisch and on the dancers who have performed it, with the aim of generating an archive of testimonies stretching across sixty-seven hours and comprising four languages, six countries and two continents. In conjunction with the opening, an encounter is scheduled for Tuesday, 27 February between the artist and the show’s curator, Lola Hinojosa, under the title Behind The Green Table of Kurt Jooss.
Radio RRS
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Podcast
Alexandra T. Vázquez
Migration and Sound
Listen to podcastAlexandra T. Vázquez (Miami, 1976) is a researcher, writer and associate professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work, framed within so-called performance studies, is centred on music, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, and Latin American and US Latina studies. This podcast contains her testimony following a conversation on her two books published to date: Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022).
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Podcast
‘92 Ends it All
Putting Out the Fuses
Listen to podcastComposed as a sound collage, this podcast, produced in 2022, includes a voice mixed with different songs and sound resources, resulting from a research project which began two years previously and echoes the events held in 1992 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Spain’s colonial legacy. Therefore, this podcast is made in relation to the rooms of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection under the title Apparatus ‘92. Can History Be Rewound?
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.