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Thursday, 29 June 2023
Documents 26. Queer Before Queer
Documentary Archaeologies in Archivo Arkhé
TicketsThis latest edition of Documents includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter. Thus, Archivo Arkhé looks to establish itself as a documentation centre which is accessible to researchers interested in one or more of its strands, as well as granting visibility to its holdings via temporary exhibitions.
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Friday, 30 June 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
I Declare Myself a Transvestite on Four Stages
Multimedia Performance by Frau Diamanda
In this multimedia stage piece, straddling monologue, confession and the activation of body and music, artist Frau Diamanda looks to explore the mutation of transvestite identity, punctuated by questions of class and race and affected by (neo)colonisation and hyperbolic exaltation. The staging serves to execute multimedia, spoken word and live music to approach the concept of transvestiteness in a way that is immersive and expansive, moving the spectator closer to that which is considered strange or far from their day-to-day.
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Friday, 7 July 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Reasons and Hate. Phobic Logics in and towards LGBTIAQ+ Collectives
Round-table Discussion
Hate and fear run through our bodies, minds, actions and discourses in different ways and from different angles as a symptom and consequence of violence which is inherited and reactivated in the present. Today, we are witness to spiralling phobia which tends to flood social space, driving out difference and stopping other types of affects from germinating. This round-table discussion features the participation of Ballet Djédje, Demetrio Gómez, Elena Prous, Tatiana Romero Reina and Iki Yos Piña, the voices of different agents hit hard by these logics of hate and fear and who refuse to assume the role of victim that pushes them aside and threatens to absorb the energy and capacity to evolve and build other ways of relating.
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28 October – 16 December 2023 Nouvel Building, Workshops, Protocol Room, and Floor 5, Study Centre
Bodies that Are Not One. Fat Practices on the Border
Study Group
RegistrationThe eight sessions in this study group coordinated by Lucrecia Masón and Tatiana Romero seek a place of knowledge in the body to, from the border — as materiality and not metaphor — set in motion a series of provocations where “fat practices” (artistic, theoretical, political) look to interrupt that which is imposed upon us as universal.
Phobia: Politics of Hate and Fear in and towards LGBTIAQ+ Collectives
LGBTIAQ+ Programme 2023
Held on 29 jun 2023
This fresh edition of the LGBTIAQ+ programme looks to explore the possibility of imaginatively and politically turning around the logics of hate and fear that run through us, socially raising questions around who personifies a non-normative sex-gender or body position. Thus, the programme endeavours to steer clear at once of victimisation which non-critically takes on a “phobic” logic determining it and any attempt at naïve “solutionism” ignoring the deep-seated roots of violence.
The activities here examine different cases of phobic violence, primarily the struggles that are structured despite and opposite them. They are carried out from contemporary debate, assembling agents which lead these debates in the present: from archive, ranging across and reactivating traces and documents with a decades-long scream for freedom in contexts of repression and extreme persecution; from the performance of the body, a living archive of these forms of violence and resistance; and from the collective exploration of new artistic and political imaginaries by convening a study group.
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The suffix -phobia pervades many of the terms that designate modes of social discrimination in non-normative sex-gender bodies and identities: lesbophobia, transphobia, homophobia, sissyphobia, fatphobia, and so on, terms that also align with others, such as xenophobia or aporophobia, and share the same semantic structure.
Although the literal meaning of phobia is “fear”, its meaning has shifted to become associated with a compulsive and irrational aversion to the “other”, whereby we perceive a threat to our integrity as individuals and as a community. Opposite that which we have a phobia towards we simultaneously flee and respond, deploying mechanisms of expulsion and destruction.
It has been forever present in the beginnings of every community, yet a culture of phobia is gaining ground in the organisation of social space for reasons stemming from the biopolitical and necropolitical matrix of contemporary populations.
Phobia feeds into discourse, shapes imaginaries and governs attitudes and behaviours which spread like wildfire through the media and on social media. Members of LGBTIAQ+ collectives are not averse to such phobias and often reproduce them with such hostility that it exposes an inner fear and hatred towards themselves.
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Curator
Jesús Carrillo
![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
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.
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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.