International Museum Day 2021
The Future Is Behind
- Film and Video
- Encounter
- Seminars and Lectures
- Guided Tour
View of the Lavapiés neighbourhood from the Nouvel Building terrace, Museo Reina Sofía
Date and time
Held on 16 may 2021
In conjunction with International Museum Day, access will be free of charge on Sunday, 16 and Monday, 17 May. Book your free general admission here.
Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía participates in the annual International Museum Day —celebrated internationally since 1977 — under the 2021 slogan proposed by ICOM (the International Council of Museums) of “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”, and thus prompts a reconsideration of the idea of a living, open institution.
The notion of historical time as a dizzying, sped-up line of progress towards the future, and questioned by the current critical conditions and the perception of time at a standstill and repeated, forces us to rethink the meaning of museums, and their role, scale, evolution and future in order to deal with present-day challenges. Learning from other world views, those which conceive of a cyclical, spiralling time in which the past is ahead and the future is behind, contributes to a re-examination of where we are situated and the paths to imagine.
Therefore, in conjunction with International Museum Day, the Museo offers two days with free entry, on 16 and 17 May, in addition to a special programme of encounters, a film series, interventions, activations and guided tours.
In turn, the Museo once again joins Radio 3 to celebrate the day, offering, on Monday, 17 May, part of the station’s schedule from the rooms of the Collection.
Sponsor
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Monday, 17 May, 2021 – 12pm and 5pm Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Centre
The Permanence of the Ephemeral. Documentation Around Performance
The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre organise an encounter that gets under way with a guided tour around their facilities, showing the different services on offer to visitors and presenting a selection of different materials from their artistic holdings, materials used to document performance art. The ephemeral, fleeting and short-lived nature of performance actions means that faithfully recording them presents a challenge for artists, institutions and publishers alike. Therefore, this activity sets forth a reflection and debate on the recording and archiving of these formats.
On the basis of these materials and in order to delve deeper into this problem, the encounter concludes with the collaborative action Añadir contacto (Add Contact), whereby the protagonists are the same attendees in the encounter. The action draws inspiration from a collaborative performance from Andrés Senra that took place on Facebook and subsequently materialised into an artist’s book.
Length: 75 minutes each session
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Tuesday, 18 May 2021 – 5:30pm Online platform
Dissent and Care. Reinventing the Museum
For decades now, the present and future of museums has been the source of perpetual public debate, in all likelihood on account of their capacity to configure narratives of collectiveness and conceive of new worlds. As a result, a large part of the tensions caused by culture wars crystallise in museums and stem from conflicts of economic, political and sensorial interests that cut through their foundations.
The debate today around their meaning, role, scale, evolution and future has intensified, to the extent that thinking about their legitimacy has become a question of survival. This encounter includes the participation of people involved in an array of museum institutions and situated in different contexts to share their experiences and projects.
Participants: Amanda de la Garza (director of MUAC, Mexico City), Elvira Dyangani Ose (director of The Showroom, London), Pablo Martínez (director of Public Activities at MACBA, Barcelona) and Mabel Tapia (deputy artistic director of Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid)
Moderated by: Ana Longoni (director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities and Study Centre, Madrid)
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Sunday, 16, and Monday, 17 May 2021 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Possible Futures. Cinema and Worlds to Come
This audiovisual series pivots on cinema’s future imagining with films made between 1920 and 2020, an historical expanse of one hundred years in which the future is manifested as an idea disputed between progress conceived as dogma, a radical critique of the present, and a yearning for new worlds. What are the imagined futures in the past and which future is projected and desired in our present?
Sunday, 16 May 2021 - 11:30am
Fritz Lang. Metropolis
Germany, 1926, b/w, silent, original version with intertitles in Spanish, restored digital archive, 152’Monday, 17 May 2021 – 6pm
Anton Vidokle. Immortality and Resurrection For All
Russia, 2017, colour, sound, original version in Russian with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 34’―With a video presentation by Anton Vidokle
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From 16 May 2021 Sabatini Building, Floor 1 and Nouvel Building, Roof
Three Centuries of Care. The Architecture of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
TicketsThree centuries on from the birth of Francisco Sabatini, the architect behind the building that housed the former Hospital General de Madrid — Madrid’s General Hospital — and today the site of Museo Reina Sofía, this project of grand modernity which primarily sought to care and heal is substantiated. In their desire to evoke the original architecture and imagine possible responses to present-day challenges, the actions here are set out in two of the Museo’s spaces, shining a light on two temporal and typological conceptions of the architecture that co-exist inside:
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Sabatini Building, Floor 1
Illustrated Utopia. Plans for the Hospital General de Madrid project
This small show occasions a reflection on the infancy of the building from the perspective of the architecture, illustrated through plans of the eighteenth-century hospital displayed on the windows of the cloister on Floor 1, and thereby restoring a project of great architectural ambition and modernity, a project which, upon completion, would have constituted one of the largest hospitals in Europe. The plans bear witness to the colossal scale of the original project, of which only a third was ever built. Three centuries on, the updated value of these documents functions as an archaeology of the present, inside a context in which the role of the Museo is once again aligned towards care.
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Nouvel Building, Roof
Museums that have never been. The architectural transformation of the old hospital into a cultural space
This intervention brings back the space of original circulation in the interior of the Nouvel Building roof for the public. Inside this space, visitors can discover the architectural transformation of the old hospital into a museum by way of a sound installation with recordings that reproduce the voice and testimonies of professionals who have been decisive in fashioning the building’s identity and were key to its conversion into a museum in the 1980s, either in its creative genesis (via projects that never materialised) or through contributions to its execution. In the 1980s, considerations revolved around how to put the former hospital to use; today, the same reflection leads us to imagine the nature of the Museo’s next architectural intervention.
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Sunday, 16 May 2021 – 11am to 2pm Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Floor 2 and Garden
Torchbearer! Family activations in the rooms of the Museo
This proposal involves a series of actions and accompaniments in the rooms of the Museo that spark the curiosity of the youngest visitors. Rather than responding to a set itinerary or shaping a standard guided tour, these activations, spread out on Floors 1 and 2, as well as other spaces such as the Garden, illuminate different works in the Collection through an enquiring gaze.
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Sunday, 16, and Monday, 17 May 2021 Sabatini Building, Garden
Guided tours to exhibitions and to the Collection
TicketsSunday, 16 May 2021
10:15am–10:45am: Feminism. A Feminist Gaze on Avant-garde Movements
11am–12pm: Guernica. History of an Icon
1-1:30pm: Moroccan Trilogy. Memories of the Other ShoreMonday, 17 May 2021
11am-12pm: Feminism. A Feminist Gaze on Avant-garde Movements
1-1:30pm: Moroccan Trilogy. Memories of the Other Shore
4–4:30pm: Everything but the Same Old Thing. Modernity and Avant-garde
5-5:30pm: Feminism. A Feminist Gaze on Avant-garde Movements
6:15-7:15pm: Moroccan Trilogy. Memories of the Other Shore![Anglada Camarasa, Sonia de Klamery (echada) (Sonia de Klamery [Lying]), 1913 (ca.)](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/feminismos-peq_1.gif "Anglada Camarasa, Sonia de Klamery (echada) (Sonia de Klamery [Lying]), 1913 (ca.)")
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Monday, 17 May 2021 – 12pm and 5:45pm Sabatini Building, Restoration Department
Restoration workshop guided tour
The Restoration Department organises a visit around its workshop to offer insight into the restoration process on Juan Gris’s work Portrait of Madame Josette Gris (1887–1927) from the Collection.
One of the Department’s restorers will offer an in-depth explanation of the different analysis methods used in the intervention, as well as the processes that have been carried out in order to conserve the work properly. For instance, they will describe the gigapixel studies with visible light, raking light and ultraviolet light, and infrared digital photography — technology which enables digital high-resolution images to be captured, outlining details that cannot be picked up by the naked eye — methods that have contributed invaluable information to gain extensive knowledge of the work. It has also enabled the undertaking of adding reversible elements to the frame, granting prior and subsequent protection of the paint, with a temperature control system and relative humidity, which will be vital when moving the painting in the future.
Length: 30 minutes per session
Department of Conservation and Restoration, sponsored by the MAPFRE Foundation
The restoration work has been funded with the help of a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project
![Juan Gris, Portrait de Madame Josette Gris [Portrait of Madame Josette Gris], 1916](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/juan_gris.png "Juan Gris, Portrait de Madame Josette Gris [Portrait of Madame Josette Gris], 1916")
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Monday, 17 May 2021 – 6pm to 8pm Sabatini Building, Room 207 and online platform
Special programme with Radio 3
Online platformThe Museo Reina Sofía once again joins Radio 3 to celebrate International Museum Day. On this occasion, Room 207 will play host to a series of live performances which will be streamed live and direct on the Radio 3 website. The programme includes participation from Ángel Stanich, La Bien Querida, Mikel Erentxun, Rozalén and Sidonie.
Length: 20 minutes per session
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8, 22 OCT, 5, 19 NOV, 3, 17, 31 DIC 2025,14, 28 ENE, 11, 25 FEB, 11, 25 MAR, 8, 22 ABR, 6, 20 MAY, 3, 17 JUN 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.
Rethinking Guernica
21, 28, 22, 29 SEP, 5, 12, 19, 26, 6, 13, 20, 27 OCT, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 3, 10, 17, 24 NOV, 7, 14, 21, 28, 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 DIC 2025
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
29 SEP, 2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
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 two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of four sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes four sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios; and international law, through the work of British writer China Miéville.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.