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?
![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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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 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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.