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Thursday, October 19, 2017 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Challenges of the International Circulation of the Memory of Critical Resistance of the Archives of Chilean art
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
There have been many writings on the subject of the archives in the international art scene during the last twenty years. The main interest -historical and museographic- lies in exploring the hidden memories of artistic practices of opposition and resistance that, in contexts of dictatorship like certain countries in Latin America during the decades of 1970s and 1980s, have articulated different modes of relationship between "art" and "politics" with their heterodox languages. Passing through networks of international mediation, the transit of the archives between the South and the North exposes its documentary sources to several problems of institutional translation. Taking as an example the Chilean case, this lecture invites to share a reflection on the waste and surplus left by the metropolitan circulation of these art archives and on the strategies needed to reactivate their critical memories.
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Friday, October 20, 2017 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Arte y política: 2005-2015 (fragmentos)
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Film, digital archive, 65', 2016. Presented by Nelly Richard and Q&A moderated by Cecilia BarrigaThis film, directed by Nelly Richard and produced by Mariaris Flores, Lucy Quezada and Diego Parra, looks at a sequence of initiatives which reflect on the cross-overs of signs and powers that dominate the political, economic, social and cultural sphere, spaces in which artistic creation and critical thought are debated in Chile. The fragments of this video combine works and voices which approach politics in art according to different strategies of form and content, language and subjectivity, symbolic representations and political-cultural intervention.
Following the screening of the film, there will be a conversation between Nelly Richard and the Chilean filmmaker Cecilia Barriga. The work of Cecilia Barriga conceives cinema as a space to make visible the struggles for representation of the social movements at large. This video uses as one of its sources her work on the student revolts in Chile after 2011.
Held on 19, 20 oct 2017
The Museo Reina Sofía master lectures, which mark the start of the Study Centre’s academic activity every year, set out to explore the different approaches and methodologies which have stretched art history in recent times. These lectures, which came into being in 2010, have been conducted by eminent art historians and theorists such as Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán and Benjamin Buchloh.
For this course the guest lecturer will be the essayist, art critic, cultural theorist, activist and Chile-based curator Nelly Richard (1948). Richard’s theoretical work is conspicuous for crossing over debates on identity and gender with a critique of the production of meaning stemming from French post-structuralist thought. Her noteworthy publications include Arte en Chile desde 1973: escena de avanzada y sociedad (1987), Chile, arte actual (1988), Textos estratégicos (2000) and Feminismo, género y diferencia(s) (2008).
This year, the programme is divided into two sessions: a lecture which puts forward a reflection on the relationship between art, gender, culture and society in the art scene in Chile, and the screening of the video Arte y política: 2005-2015 (fragmentos) [Art and Politics: 2005–2015 (Fragments)], a sequence of exhibition projects which debate the friction and dichotomies established between artistic creation and critical thought over the past decade in Chile.
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program sponsored by
Participants
Nelly Richard. Theorist and essayist. Founder and director of Revista de Crítica Cultural (1990–2008), and director of the M.A. in Cultural Studies at the University of Arts and Social Science ARCIS (2006–2013). She is the author of a wide array of national and international publications, including Diálogos latinoamericanos en las fronteras del arte (2014), Crítica y Política (2013), Crítica de la memoria (2010), Feminismo, género y diferencia(s) (2008), Fracturas de la memoria. Arte y pensamiento crítico (2007), Residuos y metáforas. Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (1998), La insubordinación de los signos: cambio político, transformaciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis (1994), Masculino / Femenino (1993) and Márgenes e Instituciones (1986, reedición en 2008). Furthermore, she curated the Chilean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, under the title Poéticas de la disidencia: Paz Errázuriz – Lotty Rosenfeld (The Poetics of Dissidence: Paz Errázuriz – Lotty Rosenfeld).
![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.