From Malaise. Community Mental Health and Critical Institutionalism
Critical Node
Held on 10, 29 mar, 12, 26 abr, 17 may 2023
In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.
From such a collective process, which solidifies in the RRS Radio podcast From Malaise and aims to expand research towards new gazes, comes this new Critical Node in 2023, part of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme.
This new stage continues by exploring the ways of living and facing contradictions inside and outside institutions, from first-person experience, artistic practice, institutional work and activism.
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Entrar Afuera is a militant research collective which explores forms of social care, considering and acting in relation to the link between public institutions and territories. Its participants live and work in Madrid and Trieste, in Italy. This Node features the participation of Marta Pérez and Irene Rodríguez Newey.
Locus* (Nada Colectivo) is a project based in the vulnerable Puente de Vallecas neighbourhood in Madrid, exploring the confluence of community culture and mental health. It subverts the concept of “a safe place” — which in psychiatric hegemony is related to spaces of police containment and health — through different contemporary creative languages and stressing co-existence with madness rooted in mutual support. This Node features the participation of Francesca Alessandro and Ana CSC.
Museo en Red is an area in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department which works to develop sustained dialogue and collaborations with different national and international agents and collectives, both in the artistic sphere and in activism and thought. This Node features the participation of Sara Buraya Boned and Celina Poloni.
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Friday, 10 March 2023 - 6:30 pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops
The Culture of Malaise
This session aims to reflect on, embody and put forward tools of care which subvert the hegemonic concept of malaise — ableist, punitivist, iatrogenic; namely that which is caused by the medical institution — towards a radical concept (imaginative, collectivist, anti-establishment) that acts as a bridge to the sessions that follow. Therefore, it approaches certain key concepts related to psychological malaise, its history as a social agent and its politicisation as a force of resistance from the optics of the international social movement Orgullo Loco (Mad Pride) and from the specific experience of the cultural project Locus*.
Wednesday, 29 March 2023 - 6:30pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops and Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Genealogies of Art and Madness
In a drift through the Museo, this session seeks to explore different narratives from, and on, madness, stressing how they become inserted inside accounts on mental health and other forms of contemporary malaise in exhibition space. Moreover, starting from the history of the Museo Reina Sofía as a former hospital, it explores its roles as a public art institution, understanding it at once as a space of representation and care and political imagination.
Wednesday, 12 April 2023 - 6:30pm / Nouvel Building, Workshops
Work and Precarity
In a society where people’s mental health is linked to their capacity to produce, the logics of paid work — or the lack thereof — increase the risk of encountering psychological suffering. This third section articulates the crossroads between work and health, analysing how production dynamics contaminate all realms of life, inhabiting and interpreting the tensions produced from the socio-economic sphere and generating creative strategies of introspection, self-defence and micro-politics.
Wednesday, 26 April 2023 - 6:30pm / To be announced soon
Institutionalism, Malaise and Care Practices
The lives of human beings pass in almost permanent contact with institutions such as schools, medical centres and museums, places where life is created, cared for and sustained but also spaces that are ultimately unable to open out and understand and welcome the lives of those who inhabit them. In this collective session, Entrar Afuera sets forth a journey through such territories swamped with norms, walls and pre-defined power logics, analysing their contradictions in an exercise of imagination which sheds light on how to make possible, and who does so, other forms of institutionalism.
Wednesday, 17 May 2023 - 6:30 h / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Radio as Bonfire
The closing session of the Critical Node From Malaise is put forward as a sound laboratory which explores the possibilities of radio as a practice of collective communication. which sheds light on how to make possible, and who does so, other forms of institutionalism.
Organised by
Entrar Afuera, Locus* (Nada Colectivo) and Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
Participants
Participants
![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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
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
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
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.