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Tuesday, 10 October 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Conversation with Chris Ware
— Participant: Elisa McCausland
Tickets -
Wednesday, 11 October 2023 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Encounter with Chris Ware
— Participants: Carla Berrocal, Enrique Bordes and Raquel Jimeno
Tickets
Chris Ware, ACME Novelty Library, 2022 © Chris Ware
Date and time
Held on 10, 11 oct 2023
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, examining themes that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This instalment centres on the work of draughtsman and cartoonist Chris Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 1967), one of the pre-eminent names in independent comics. Ware will also take part in a conversation with Elisa McCausland and encounter with Carla Berrocal, Enrique Bordes and Raquel Jimeno.
The comic can be regarded as a form of visual writing which, in contrast to prose, gives rise to associations and forms of reminiscence through the conjunction of text and image. Using this quality, Ware explores the borders between the real and the imagined, untethering the full potential of a perfected and virtuoso drawing to shape an architectural world inhabited by profoundly melancholy beings. Such examples are the orphan Jimmy Corrigan, the lonely Rusty Brown or the sad mouse Quimby, a version of Ignatz the mouse, a character by his much-admired George Herriman, one of the pioneers of the medium alongside Winsor McCay, or more recently Charles Schulz, both of whom Ware also cites and pays homage to. Despite their predicaments of failure and marginalisation, these characters continue to dream of other lives, a strain between the realism and escapism characterising the universe and personal history of the comics the artist creates. A further hallmark of his practice are his graphic novels straddling book and artefact, and his design of every aspect, from the typeface to the binding, from the overall storyline to the complex world in each vignette. Moreover, he explores and expands the creative possibilities of the book as an object, as in Building Stories (Pantheon Graphic Novels, 2012), a collection in box format which contains fourteen different types of printed works — newspapers, magazines, folded boards, pamphlets and leaflets — in no particular order and can thus be read depending on the connections each reader wishes to make.
At once a brilliant inventor and methodical artisan of books, Ware has connected with the origins of the comic book, putting forward powerful narrative revisions, and showing us, in a celebration of reading, narration and the page, how the comic strip and drawn stories, even in the digital age, are among the most fascinating artistic practices of our time.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Centro José Guerrero (Granada City Council) and La Madraza. Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (University of Granada)
Programme
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Chris Ware is a cartoonist. His graphic art, which draws inspiration from American artists from the beginning and middle of the twentieth century, and experiments with the language of the medium are a reference point for scores of cartoonists and illustrators worldwide. His graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) won the Guardian First Book Award (UK, 2001) and the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album (Angoulême, France, 2003), while Building Stories received the Eisner Award in 2013. His work has also been displayed in museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2002), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2006) and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2022). His practice extends beyond the sphere of the cartoon strip, encompassing illustration and graphic design, as shown by his different covers for The New Yorker or his design of George Herriman’s series Krazy & Ignatz for the publishing house Fantagraphics (2019–2023).
Carla Berrocal is an illustrator and cartoonist. Notable among her publications are Epigrafías (Libros del Autoengaño, 2017), La geometría de los silencios: Relatos reales de vidas imaginarias (CEPE, 2019) and Doña Concha. La rosa y la espina (Reservoir Books, 2021). For the third project mentioned she received a MAEC-AECID Comic Book Grant from the Spanish Academy in Rome. Furthermore, she has curated, with Elisa McCausland, the exhibition Presentes: autoras de tebeo de ayer y hoy (Colectivo de Autoras de Cómic and AECID, 2016), which has toured different institutions.
Enrique Bordes is an architect and researcher specialised in graphic art and comics. His work encompasses different spheres such as the comic strip, architecture, museography and photography. Since 2003, he has combined his professional work with university lecturing and, in 2015, was awarded a grant from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, in the Design section. He is the author of the publication Cómic, arquitectura narrativa (Cátedra, 2017).
Raquel Jimeno is an activity coordinator at the Museo Reina Sofía.
Elisa McCausland (1983) is a journalist, critic and researcher specialised in comics. She is a regular contributor to Radio 3, Dirigido por, El Salto and Sofilm, and her most notable publications include Wonder Woman. El feminismo como superpoder (Errata Naturae, 2017) and, with Diego Salgado, Supernovas. Una historia de la ciencia ficción audiovisual (Errata Naturae, 2019) and Sueños y Fábulas. Historia de Vertigo (Ecc Ediciones, 2022). Furthermore, she has curated the exhibition Presentes: Autoras de tebeo de ayer y hoy (Rome, 2016), and promoted Colectivo de Autoras de Cómic (The Collective of Women Comics Artists) and is a member of the ECC-UAH Chair of Comic Research and Culture.
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.