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Friday, 27 October 2017 Edificio Nouvel, Auditorio 200
Encounter with Esther Ferrer
In conversation with Laurence Rassel and Mar Villaespesa
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Laurence Rassel and Mar Villaespesa will engage in dialogue with the artist, touching on some of the underpinnings in her artistic practice, for instance the visibility of the creative process in time and space, the mobility and transformation of the body, and repetition and chance as a driving force enhancing her work.
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Saturday, 28 October 2017 Edificio Nouvel, Auditorio 200
Le fils des étoiles
Concert performed by Laurence Verna in Esther Ferrer’s work Piano Satie
Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
Le fils des étoiles was composed by Erik Satie — who later arranged the preludes to the work for a piano solo — in 1891 to accompany a three-act poetic drama by Joséphin Péladan. This composition is considered one of Satie’s most radical works because of its explorations with quartal harmony and its concept of theatre music, leading to it being classified as ‘decorative static sound’.
Esther Ferrer’s work Piano Satie has been produced for the exhibition by the Museo Reina Sofía.
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Sunday, 29 October 2017 Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
I’m Going to Tell You About My Life
Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
We’re going to tell our life stories, either true or false. Who knows? It doesn’t matter anyway, because even if we recount an invention, the very fact of telling it is inevitably part of our lives, our biographies. Each language has its rhythm, its particular sounds, and we all have a way of using it with gestural language that distinguishes us. When we all speak in unison, it’s as though we were listening to the world’s voices: all are languages, but all are different; all are vulnerable but necessary.
An inclusive action, open to different languages, nationalities, origins, interests, communication methods, capacities (sensory, cognitive and/or physical).
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Wednesday 22 and Friday 24 November 2017 Edificio Nouvel, Auditorio 200
The Art of Performance: Theory and Practice (1) and (2)
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
A performance is a lecture or a lecture is a performance, a theory that becomes practice, a practice that becomes theory. In this two-session performance lecture, Esther Ferrer calls into question that which is understood by the performance genre, that which is conveyed and how much of it is understood by the audience: the real, imaginary, logical, absurd, obvious, the less obvious, a specific mode of doing and speaking. Because in truth, what is a performance? A genre? A hybrid? Artistic expression? A tall story? A joke? A Challenge? A scam? Torture? Anything?
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Thursday, 23 November 2017 Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
TA, TE, TI, TO, TU
Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
This radiophonic action invites participants to pass through different spaces in the city in the company of Esther Ferrer. During the route, around two hours, the group will repeat TA, TE, TI, TO, TU, TA, TE, TI, TO, TU, TA, TE, TI, TO, TU over and over … as the sounds of the urban environment interfere with this kind of rolling, non-stop psalmody.
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Saturday, 24 February 2018 Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
ZAJ Concert for 60 Voices
Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro
The world makes sound, time passes; we barely notice, immersed as we are in that maelstrom of sound and noise which appears to clog up our hearing. The chant, the yell, the recital, the speech, the interrogation… they arise hoping to lend rhythm to this chaos, yet once again chaos rules to become a wall of sound, compact, impenetrable.
The ZAJ concert assembles 60 voices, paying no heed to sex, age or social position, and is directed like an orchestra by the artist. Each performer can speak, recite or sing the corresponding phrase just once or repeat it as many times as they wish in the space of one minute, changing language, intonation, etc. as they please.
Held on 24 feb 2018
Within the framework of the exhibition Esther Ferrer. All Variations Are Valid, Including this One, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Actions, a series of interventions arranged with scores in the form of a user manual and directed by Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) in person, thereby retrieving the Fluxus spirit, the crux of her work. The actions encourage the audience to witness, walk, tell, listen, and question; in short, to experiment with the core elements in the artist’s work, aspects she will discuss with the exhibition’s curators, Laurence Rassel and Mar Villaespesa, during an encounter that marks the start of the series.
A pioneer and one of the foremost representatives of performance art in Spain, Esther Ferrer began participating in the activities of the Zaj group — with Walter Marchetti, Ramon Barce and Juan Hidalgo — in 1967. From that point on, she brought action art to the fore in her artistic practice, although from 1970 she did return to visual art by way of reworked photographs, installations, objects, pictures based on the series of prime numbers or Pi, and so on. Her work adheres to the Minimalist and Conceptual Art initiated in the 1960s, with Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Perec, John Cage and Fluxus the points of reference, along with aspects of feminism from the time.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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.