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Thursday, 25 March 2021 – 6pm / Museo Reina Sofía, Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Among So Many
Encounter with Safaa Erruas, Abdellah Karroum, Karim Rafi and Younes Rahmoun
A conversation between artists Safaa Erruas (Tétouan,1976), Karim Rafi (Casablanca, 1975) and Younes Rahmoun (Tétouan,1975), and the show’s curator, Abdellah Karroum (Rif, 1970), on the relationships between artistic creation and the territory in which they are situated, as well as how artistic activity is lived and developed in Morocco. The conversation will be moderated by Susana Moliner, curator of the In the Meantime programme.
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Saturday, 27 March 2021 – 11am / Casa Árabe
Domestic Constellations
The point of departure of this workshop is the world of Mohamed Larbi Rahhali (Tétouan,1956), an artist who, via variegated elements such as fishing nets, matchboxes with detailed drawings and other small everyday objects, is capable of connecting different scales of representation, a material universe that gives rise to multiple dimensions of meaning in the world we inhabit. In a dialogue with the artist, the workshop puts forward the collective production of installations, where each participant articulates a constellation from this universe through quotidian materials.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
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Thursday, 8 April 2021 – 6pm / Museo Reina Sofía, Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
Documents 17. Souffles (1966–1971)
An Art, Culture and Politics Magazine from Morocco
This new edition of Documents is centred on the Moroccan cultural and avant-garde journal Souffles — directed by poet Abdellatif Laâbi, it brought together the most relevant voices in poetry, art and thought from post-colonial Maghreb from 1966 until it was banned at the beginning of 1972. The encounter gets under way with a presentation by Abdellatif Laâbi, before moving on to a lecture by researcher and journalist Kenza Sefrioui and the reading of different manifestos and poetry published in Souffles and translated into Spanish for the first time for this event. It concludes with a dialogue between both speakers.
Force line: Avant-gardes
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Wednesday, 26 May 2021 – 6pm / Museo Reina Sofía, Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Feminisms in Morocco
A Drift Through Territories
At a time of boiling-point and multiplicity in the feminist movement, Maggie Schmitt and Hanan Dalouh Amghar undertook a research process that started with a trip around Morocco in February 2020. This presentation explores the feminist collectives — and/or women’s and gender dissidence collectives — that are currently active in the Moroccan territory, and the practices, debates and challenges put forward among these groups and with Moroccan society, as well as the links that can be established with the situation in Mediterranean Europe.
Participants: Hanan Dalouh Amghar, Souad Eddouada, Zohra Koubia, Nadia Naïr and Maggie Schmitt
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and La Laboratoria. Feminist Research Spaces
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Programme: In the Meantime -
From 28 June to 6 July 2021 / Medialab Prado
Double Faces II
The work of Yassine Balbzioui (Mohammedia, 1972) questions the play with simulation, the mask, the “unsaid” that societies organise and which come to form reality. In his work Double Faces II during his Medialab Prado residency, he resumes the collaboration and performance Double Faces started during Dak'Art, the 2012 African Contemporary Art Biennial, with Yago Torroja (Madrid, 1963), a professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and researcher in the field of artistic practice and new technology. The result of this collaboration will occasion an interactive performance, to be held on 6 July 2021 at 7pm in Medialab Prado (Alameda Street 15).
Force line: Avant-gardes
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Thursday, 1 July 2021 – 6pm / Museo Reina Sofía, Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Love Is Not a Crime
With Najat El Hachmi, Zainab Fasiki and Abdelá Taia
In this encounter, writer Najat El Hachmi (Nador, 1979), feminist illustrator Zainab Fasiki (Fez, 1994) and writer Abdelá Taia (Salé, 1973) will discuss the ever more frequent protest actions around sexual rights in the private and public spheres.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
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Saturday, 3 July 2021 – 12pm / Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Documents 18. Skefkef Magazine
A Commons Publication from the Maghreb
Skefkef is an independent comics magazine for adults, created in 2013 in Casablanca, which explores the social and cultural dimensions of contemporary Morocco via satirical drawings and texts. This session sees Salah Malouli (Casablanca,1979), a founding member of the publication, analyse how its appearance has shed light on a generation of artists interested in self-management and a culture of the commons.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
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From 5 to 9 July 2021 / Casa Árabe
I’m Here
Performance and Workshop with Nezha Rhondali (Lisa Dali)
FormDuring this workshop, participants will be able to approach the corporeal practice of artist Nezha Rhondali, aka Lisa Dali (Lyon, 1983) and the actions she carries out in urban spaces in Morocco with her collective. The workshop will conclude with a presentation of the resulting work.
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Thursday 2, Friday, 3 and Saturday, 4 September 2021 - 11am / Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Workshops
Artivism and the Female Body
Fanzine Workshop with Zainab Fasiki
This activity sets out to collectively create a fanzine to explore the representation of bodies in the company of Zainab Fasiki, a feminist draughtswoman and illustrator whose first published comic Omor. Only between us (2017) explores the difficulties facing women living in Morocco. In 2018, she put together Hshouma (Taboo), a website and comic on taboos in Moroccan society with a significant social and media impact in her country.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
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15 September 2021 – 7pm / Casa Árabe
Around and Through Three Points in Time
Dialogue Between Abdellah Karroum and Driss Ksikes
FormCoinciding with the conclusion of the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020, this encounter seeks to conduct an analysis of the capacity of artistic creation to affect and open the way for new meanings of the collective and how this has taken place in contemporary Moroccan society.
The dialogue between Abdellah Karroum, the exhibition’s curator, and playwright and thinker Driss Ksikes, surveys the cultural ecosystems which arise and intersect the three historical junctures proposed in the exhibition, spanning the transition to independence (1950–1969), the so-called Years of Lead (1970–1999) and from then to the present day (2000–2020).
Force-line: Commons
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From 16 to 19 September 2021 / Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Workshops
Collective Weaving
A Weaving and Creative Textiles Workshop with Safaa Erruas
The work of Safaa Erruas (Tétouan,1976) explores ideas of the body and borders via visceral objects created from fabrics. The workshop aims to produce textile works that reflect the testimonies of Moroccan collectives living in Madrid.
Force line: Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
With the collaboration of: Museo Situado -
From 20 to 23 September 2021 / IES Pradolongo, Madrid, and Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Workshops
Nos medailles
Workshop with M’barek Bouhchichi
Using rudimentary and clay-like materials, visual artist M'barek Bouhchichi (Akka, 1975) makes work that evokes denied or silenced identities and voices. In this workshop, in collaboration with IES Pradolongo, Madrid, the idea of the medal is explored and based on American sculptor David Smith’s series Medals for Dishonor (1938–1940), which are part of the Muso Reina Sofía Collection.
With the collaboration of: IES Pradolongo, Madrid
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Tuesday, 21 September 2021 – 7pm / Casa Árabe
African Presence and Invisibility
In this encounter, moderated by journalist Sarah Babiker (Madrid, 1979), artists M'barek Bouhchichi (Akka, 1975) and Yeison F. García López (Cali,1992) will engage in dialogue to deploy a critical gaze on the racial dimension of their own national identity through their art work.
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
In the Meantime

Held on 25 Mar 2021
Inside the framework of the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 (31 March – 27 September 2021), which surveys the cultural evolution of the Maghreb country over recent decades by way of 250 works, the Museo Reina Sofía joins Medialab Prado and Casa Árabe to organise In the Meantime, a programme of activities which seeks to bring to light and question the complexity of Morocco’s contemporary reality via an encounter between different artists and creators from the country. Curated by Susana Moliner, the programme comprises round-table discussions, conversations, lectures, workshops and performances, to be held across the three sites mentioned above over a six-month period.
In the Meantime looks to provide a device which contributes to activating and articulating networks between guest cultural agents from Morocco and local communities in Spain. The programme’s activities explore tensions between Morocco’s social environment and privacy; the multiple ways in which Moroccan artists work to gather and hybridise knowledge and art-making; the critical production of independent publications released from the mid-1960s to the present day; the diversity of romantic ties and ways of relating to the environment and inhabiting it. Essentially, an exploration of events across the intermediate time that opens up between the three periods structuring the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 exhibition, underscoring not only the present but also the artistic potential and collective movements inscribed in its different territories and landscapes.
The programme’s activities feature the participation of numerous artists, such as Yassine Balbzioui, Safaa Erruas, Mohamed Larbi, Karim Rafi and Younes Rahmoun; writers Najat El Hachmi and Abdelá Taia; cultural researchers such as Driss Ksikes, Salah Malouli and Kenza Sefrioui; feminist illustrator Zaineb Fasiki, performer Lila Dila and visual artist M'barek Bouhchichi.
In the Meantime seeks to offer diverse possibilities for thinking about and placing context around the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 show, organised inside a framework of cultural cooperation between Spain and Morocco in the sphere of Museums and promoted by the National Foundation of Museums from the Kingdom of Morocco and the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, in collaboration with Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.
Comisariado
Susana Moliner (Grigri Projects)
Más actividades
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.

Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.

Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.

Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.

Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.

![Zainab Fasiki, Hshouma [Tabú], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/zainab.png.webp)
