Held on 20 Dec 2022
The helplessness experienced in the death of thousands of people during the recent global pandemic, in addition to successive and current wars, exists alongside a growing sadness over environmental collapse and the destruction of life on Earth. In this context of social disturbance, forms of rituality and collective care arise, inviting us to reflect on the power of mourning to reshape relationships with the world.
In contemporary Western societies there is the prevailing conception of mourning as the process an individual must go through after the loss of affective ties to those who have passed. This acceptance, imposed as work based on the exercise of forgetting, is revised by Vinciane Despret in her book Our Grateful Dead. Stories of Those Left Behind (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). In it, Despret gathers the testimonies of lived experiences during mourning, and suggests we listen and tend to other forms of existence in our relationships with those who are no longer here. Gestures, behaviours and unusual attentions that can lead to mourning not being conceived negatively as an anomaly that we must cure ourselves of, but as a state which is able to perceive and house modes of uncommon co-existence between people, times, spaces and beings.
Drawing inspiration from these ideas, the programme starts by setting forth a critical questioning of the conception of mourning as individual experience, addressing the collectiveness of life and the conditions and categorisation of the sick body. It prompts a study of present issues in situated ecologies — for instance analogies between ways of life — so as to observe the tensions or conflicts that stem from them. The question around whether it is possible, as a society, to imagine and put into practice gestures that nurture a more just co-existence between humans and other species — animals, plants and minerals — and which also dissociate themselves from the established relations of consumption, destruction or domination, form the backbone of the overall intention of Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning.
The Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning Study Group is articulated around six sessions grouped into two blocks, whereby artists and researchers who work in different fields of knowledge — Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Marwa Arsanios, Rebecca Collins, María García Ruiz, Germán Labrador, José Antonio Sánchez, Alejandro Simón and Leire Vergara — are invited to share their investigations, readings, experiences and artworks, with the aim of cultivating a terrain of reflection and debate around mourning. It also follows on from the study groups previously coordinated by the research group Artea — Body, Territory and Conflict (2020–2021) and Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities (2022) — and is linked to the research project The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices of Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene, directed by Fernando Quesada, from the University of Alcalá de Henares, and funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
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Alejandro Alonso Díaz is a curator and writer whose practice explores the metabolic encounters between the natural, social and poetic structures of knowledge. He explores intimate epistemologies traversed by ecology, love and resilience, often based on investigations into other possible forms of existence and radical otherness. He recently co-edited the book Microbiopolitics of Milk (Sternberg Press, 2022), and is the director of fluent, an organisation devoted to contemporary art in Santander.
Marwa Arsanios is an artist, film-maker and researcher. Through her work she reconsiders the political ideology of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing more specifically on the relations between gender, urbanism and industrialisation. She approaches research from collaboration and a cross-over of disciplines, and has exhibited her work in spaces that include The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). She is the co-founder of the 98Weeks Reserch/Project Space.
Rebecca Collins is an artist and researcher. Her main research interests encompass listening, performing arts, sound studies and creative and critical writing. Since 2017, she has been a lecturer of Contemporary Art Theory at The University of Edinburgh. Collins’s work explores how critical, fictitious and performative interventions can cultivate attention towards our contemporary condition. She is currently a resident at the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT/UAM/CSIC).
María García Ruiz is a visual artist and researcher who holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Granada and is studying her PhD in Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She carries out her investigations around the production, physical and imagined, of territory through the articulation of hybrid narratives between image, writing and action. She currently develops her artistic practice as a resident in Hangar (2022–2024).
German Labrador is a researcher and has been director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department since 2021.
José Antonio Sánchez is a lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Cuenca and is a founder of the research group ARTEA and the MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture, organised by UCLM and the Museo Reina Sofía. His recent publications include Cuerpos ajenos (2017) and Tenéis la palabra. Apuntes sobre teatralidad y justicia (2022), and he has coordinated different events of thought and creation, for instance Situaciones (1999-2002), Jerusalem Show (2011) and No hay más poesía que la acción (2013).
Alejandro Simón is an artist, researcher and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca. He wrote his doctoral thesis Recordar las facultades del arte. Bellas Artes y Universidad en Madrid 1967-1992 (Recalling the Faculties of Art. Fine Arts and University in Madrid, 1967–1992) in 2019 at the Complutense University of Madrid. Furthermore, he curated the exhibition Essays on Seediness. Readings of the Miguel Benlloch Archive, with Mar Villaespesa and Joaquín Vázquez, at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM).
Leire Vergara is a curator who holds a PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a member of Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao. She has curated numerous series and exhibitions in institutions that include the Academia de España en Roma (2021), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2017) and Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (2016). Furthermore, she has been head curator at Sala Rekalde and a coordinator, with Peio Aguirre, of the DAE-Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak cultural association.
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Tuesday, 20 December 2022 – 5pm
The Tides Are the Artists. The Forms and Memory of the Nunca Máis Movement
—Conducted by Germán Labrador
Wednesday, 21 December 2022 – 5pm
By Autonomy We Understand Dependency on the Wind, Nutrients from the Earth, the Action of the Sun, and Rain during Winter and Spring
—Conducted by Alejandro Simón
Thursday, 22 December 2022 – 5pm
The Road to Tsukuba (Autoimmune Landscapes)
—Conducted by María García Ruiz
Tuesday, 24 January 2023 – 5pm
Detectives of the Invisible: Towards Cosmological Listening or How to Hear Evasive Particles
—Conducted by Rebecca Collins
Wednesday, 25 January 2023 – 5pm
Who is Afraid of Ideology?
—Conducted by Marwa Arsanios, José Antonio Sánchez and Leire Vergara
Thursday, 26 January 2023 – 5pm
An Energy that Comes Apart
—Conducted by Alejandro Alonso Díaz
Coordinated by
Isabel de Naverán (ARTEA)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
Material adicional
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 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.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.