Held on 28 Jan 2021
Night of Ideas is an annual event propelled since 2016 by the Institut français in Paris and occasions a reflection on the major challenges of our times. The sixth edition of the event in 2021 is held under the title Proches (Close) and sets out to rethink the relations between living beings and new forms of solidarity. As a result, the Institut français in Madrid and Museo Reina Sofía have organised a programme which unfurls in different formats and lays out different approaches, from philosophical thought to artistic practice and collective endeavours.
In Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018), revisited in his lecture in the Museo Reina Sofía, the philosopher suggests that if it is from plants that we ought to enquire what the world is, this is because it is they who “make the world”. In a presentation around “making place”, Alejandra Riera advocates reconsidering, more mindfully, the relations between human and non-human beings, as sets that are linked, composed, at odds and in dialogue; the result of mixing. “To notice”, writes the artist, “the existence of this place, in this seesaw of exchanges between things-beings-worlds, feels poetically urgent. Incidentally, ‘mixture’, Coccia reminds us, is the common name for what we call, in its proper name, World”. The programme also includes a workshop run by the Torta Collective, a public debate moderated by María González Reyes and a performance by artist Itziar Okariz.
Programme
Retiro Park, Palacio de Cristal, and Sabatini Building, Garden
Activity canceled due to temporary closure of the Retiro Park
4:30pm Entering Through the Window. A New Drift for Travelling Through a Museum, a workshop led by the Torta Collective.
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In the Museo some spaces and doors are open to insects, birds, fungi, yeasts and algae, yet they all pass through cautiously and with trepidation; although they are all invited, we rarely see them. In this workshop, run by the Torta Collective, a walk is put forward through which to build devices to welcome these “beings that protect other beings” who have exited museums swiftly, no longer daring to enter. To enter through the window.
Starting in the Palacio de Cristal, which has opened its windows to allow birds and insects in as part of Petrit Halilaj’s exhibition To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love, the expedition includes the making of a house of insects in the Retiro Park and the exploration of the so-called “garden of mixtures” in the Sabatini Building, to finally leave out the back of the Museo, via Calle Hospital. Therefore, the workshop is an incursion with which to create an experience and, like barely visible insects, to leave an almost imperceptible trace.
*Attending the workshop with a flask or small bottle of water is recommended.
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Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
6:00pm Making Room. (Inherent) Possible Transformations, presented by Alejandra Riera.
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In the words of Riera: “This proposal involves jointly addressing a reflection around making, inventing places, making place, making room, reconsidering, with greater focus, the relations between human-non-human beings, as sets that are linked, composed, at odds and in dialogue; approaching the question of the ‘here’ in which we find ourselves, as a carrier of narratives and different forms of being. Taking into account life and the uses of places, their forms and potential transformations, and remembering that the point of view is in the body, we will attempt to reflect on what we produce and sketch out differences and places of convergence between landscape, place and environment. Thus, perhaps we can try to imagine how to make place, make place-walkways collectively.
In view of where we find ourselves, where we are going, we always make place and the idea is that ‘encounter has a place’ and that this place is necessary for the encounter to
be as open as possible. Ultimately, there are enough of us interested and ready to re-enliven places in which our lives don’t do anything, when all is said and done, more than pass by, but which we also inhabit in the present. Singularly and collectively, through yet-to-be-found gestures, will we manage to transform issues of so-called ‘ecological transition’ in an issue that has always affected relations, the forms of relation or separation with a still sensitive world around us?
The world of sensibility, that which touches us and through which, like plants — those beings of such eloquent mutism and diversity — we learn that, occasionally, ‘there is no greater proximity than assuming the distance of the other’, as anti-concentration camp psychiatrist Jean Oury said upon describing his mode of relating to people whose form of acting and whose language are hard to comprehend, the mad, but with whom he had decided to closely forge his path.
Emanuele Coccia acknowledges that plants are the only things that, through photosynthesis, do not need to feed off other living beings to survive, while all other organisms live exclusively by incorporating the lives of others. Coccia does not tell us what we must do or no longer do, what we must think of and about beings. More accurately, his ethics seems related to not enclosing, neither closing nor establishing closed categories, nor favouring nor exercising condescendence, which is so widespread, but rather inviting ourselves to doubt any account (both of origin and evolution) that does not recognise the ‘mix’ that exists in us. A mix with no fusion. Not a summation or juxtaposition, not a total integration-fusion, but a mix that already takes place within us. Understanding the existence of this place, this seesaw of exchanges between things-beings-worlds feels poetically urgent. Incidentally, ‘mixture’, Coccia reminds us, is the common name for what we call, in its proper name, World”.
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7:00pm The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture, a lecture by Emanuele Coccia.
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“We barely talk about them and their names escape us. Philosophy has customarily relegated them; even biology considers them as a simple decoration on the tree of life. Yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us; they are the origin of breath that animates us. Plants embody the closest and most elemental link that life can establish with the world. Under the sky and clouds, mixing with water and wind, their existence is a never-ending cosmic contemplation. The Life of Plants is situated from the point of view of plants — leaves, roots, flowers — to understand the world not as a universal space that contains everything, but as the general atmosphere, the climate, a place of true metaphysical mixture,” Emanuele Coccia writes.
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7:45pm Public debate, moderated by María González Reyes
8:15pm The Ocean Breath, performance by Itziar Okariz, in a collaboration with Izar Ocariz, presented by Isabel de Naverán.
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This work is built from a chorus of breathing. Ujjayi is a breathing technique used in yoga, whereby the artist is the instructor. The word ujjayi means “one who is victorious” and is normally translated as “the ocean breath” because it is the image it evokes. The piece is figurative in nature, between the abstract space of the sound of breathing and the image that generates, as though sign and meaning were separate, fractures.
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Organised by
Institut français and Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and associate professor (maître de conférences) at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris (EHESS). He also holds a PhD in Medieval Philosophy from the University of Florence and has served as adjunct professor in the History of Philosophy at the Alberts Ludwig University of Frieburg, in Freiburg im Breisgau, and Art History at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris. His books, translated into various languages, include Filosofía de la Imaginación. Averroes y el averroísmo (Adriana Hidalgo, 2007), Sensible Life (Fordham University Press, 2016), El bien en las cosas. La publicidad como discurso moral (Shangrila Textos Aparte, 2015), The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018) and Métamorphoses (Payot & Rivage, 2020).
María González Reyes is a professor of Biology in Secondary Education and an activist with Ecologists in Action, where she participates in the sphere of environmental education and eco-feminism. She is the author of numerous books of short stories and co-author of Cambio climático (Litera, 2019), among others. She has written numerous articles related to social environmentalism and contributed to different publications, for instance El Salto, Revista Papeles, Cuadernos de Pedagogía, Graó, La Marea, Revista Ecologista and Pikara Magazine.
Isabel de Naverán conducts research at the crossroads between art, contemporary choreography and performance in projects of curatorship, publishing and writing. She holds a PhD in Art from University of the Basque Country and is part of the research group Artea. In 2010, she founded, with Leire Vergara, Miren Jaio and Beatriz Cavia, Bulegoa z/b - Oficina de arte y conocimiento in Bilbao, a project she was connected to until 2018. Since 2017 she has been in charge of curating live arts (dance-performance) in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Itziar Okariz works in the sphere of action and performance, questioning ways of regulating language and the production of signs that define us. Her most recent projects include her participation in Las estatuas (Museo Jorge Oteiza Foundation, Alzuza, 2020), 13th Shangai Biennale (2020), Perforated by (for the Spanish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, with Sergio Prego, 2019), I Never Said Umbrella (Tabakalera, San Sebastián, 2018), Una construcción, es decir, una jerarquía de momentos, expresiva de cierto concepto grande o pequeño, abstracto esotérico (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018), Itziar Okariz (Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, 2017) and Dream Diary (Ars Parcours, Basel, 2017). Izar Ocariz likes to read, write, draw and do karate. Both live in Bilbao.
Alejandra Riera, born in Buenos Aires, has lived and worked in France for thirty years, where she is a professor of Documentary and Transversal Practices and Poetics at the National School of Art Cergy-Paris, and previously taught Film and Documentary Practices at the National School of Art Bourges over an eleven-year period. She upholds a sustained and focused practice on plants and the practice of writing and photography and film (films-documents). Her endeavours and research set forth questions that surface between images and texts as they drive forward the realisation of situated poetics of gestures that join diverse forms of knowledge, knowledge that interrogates the ways we read history and geography.
Her efforts have often fuelled thinking, gestures and collective writings, while her research and plastic and filmic endeavours have been presented on numerous occasions inside and outside of spaces devoted solely to disseminating art and film productions. Since 2017, she has prepared and made a place for, in a collective endeavour, the Garden of Mixtures in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Torta is a collective, made up of Tom Cano and Marta Pérez, which puts forward organic modes of production with the aim of placing value on the links between nature and sustainability, fostering a distancing from neoliberal formulas of competitiveness and efficiency and taking up art and food as research tools. The Collective’s practice is defined as a mode of weaving ties and discourses that help to understand present-day conflicts. During the 2019/2020 academic year, Torta have designed and accompanied the programme of equipo1821 in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 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.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.