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
![Isabel Coixet, 100 Years and You Everywhere [100 años y tú en todos los sitios], 2026, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/2.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
John Berger and Isabel Coixet. Continued Ways of Seeing
Thursday, 17 September 2026 at 7pm
Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.
The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.
![Chantal Akerman, Woman Sitting after Killing [Mujer sentada después de matar], 2001, instalación. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/chantal-akerman-mujer-sentada-despues-matar.jpg.webp)
On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge
18, 19 SEP 2026
The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.
In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art.
Godard and Miéville: Time and Ruin
Friday, 18 September 2026 - 7pm
Inside the framework of the conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge, this film series sets forth three critical visions of the museum via three sessions featuring the works of John Berger, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ariella Azoulay, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker, Kwate Nee-Owoo, and the premiere of short films by Isabel Coixet and La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado). In classical theory, the museum gives the world meaning; it contains fragments of the past, granting them a history, a narrative that explains preterite time and the present. Today, there is an implicit assumption that this function hides and legitimises forms of power, yet what if the museum, instead of explaining the world, multiplied it through radical ideas, silenced periods and repressed subjects? Such is the approach of the film-makers and artists in this film season.
In 1972 the writer John Berger opened the landmark television series Ways of Seeing with an iconoclastic gesture: slicing Sandro Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars (1485) in London’s National Gallery. A transgressive act that recalls contemporary attacks on the museum by dissident youth and with which Berger, after revealing it was a reproduction, sought to ignite debate around the idea of an original artwork and a copy. In this, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first session pays homage to one of the great art writers of the twentieth century. Starting with a review of Berger’s audiovisual work by art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola, the series begins with the premiere of 100 Years and You Everywhere (2026), an unreleased short film by Isabel Coixet composed as a beautifully crafted letter to Berger, and continues with an analysis of fragments of Ways of Seeing in relation to the museum and contemporary art.
The second session screens two medium-length films by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville on time, ruin and museum. In The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century (1999), both film-makers consider what remains of that “old place”, the museum, at the close of a century of wars and totalitarianism, and ask whether it should be more of a legend or desire than a place. This same driving principle leads Godard to build his own imaginary museum in Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006), a rickety toy museum which, paradoxically, contains the great film-maker’s full power of thought on history and images.
Finally, the third session explores one of the major challenges of recent years: the decolonisation of the museum, the recognition of its link to imperialist discourses of power and the need to situate a new silenced or repressed subject at the centre of the Western narration of history. Under the title Museums and Restitution, it includes the film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), by theorist Ariella Azoulay, Statues Also Die, by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker (1953), Kwate Nee-Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and the first screening of the short film Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), by La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado), filmed at the Museo de América in Madrid.
![Ariella Azoulay, Un-documented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder [Indocumentados. Desaprendiendo el saqueo imperial], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/5.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
Museums and Restitution
Saturday, 19 September 2026 - 7pm
Centuries of plundering, decades of amnesia, years of living with unmitigated extractivist power… Does a museum, as we know it, have a raison d'être in a postcolonial society?
This session expounds the operations of the museum as a colonial machine, while putting forward ideas, in narration, for a more just, equal and inclusive institution of the future via society’s marginalised and minority voices. The session begins with the international premiere of Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), which presents a vision of the Quimbaya Collection (fifth and sixth centuries CE) from the Museo de América in Madrid. It is constructed with the voices and chants of Wayúu mourners and guides, not only as a way of reinstating the role of these gold idols — anthropomorphic figures of men and women used as vessels in ritual practices — but also to imagine that what must be exhibited is not the gold itself. It is the ritual’s own chant. In the classic film You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian film-maker Kwate Nee-Owoo accesses the British Museum’s collection of African art, located in the building’s basement, to question the meaning behind a museum plundering and nullifying. A fine exercise of first-person institutional critique screened for the first time in Spain. Almost seventy years since Resnais and Marker made Statues Also Die (1953), a reflection on the aura-bearing value of the museum opposite the identity-based and cultural belonging of African art, theorist Ariella Azoulay films the same statues again at the Musée du Trocadéro (today the Musée du Quai Branly), which survive and wait to be reunited with their people. Azoulay, whose wholly original undertaking is a lesson to the museum of the future, connects the forced migration of these sculptures with the mass transit of people crossing borders artificially imposed by the same system that has plundered their culture.
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation
From 21 to 24 September 2026
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation (S.T.I.L.O.) is a programme of joint learning and join strategy which sets in motion a process for the exchange of questions, methodologies and experiences between cultural organisations. The overall aim is to create, circulate and prototype tactics, tools and collective knowledge on institutional practices that open new channels for defending culture and advocating structural transformation in divergent geographical contexts.
The project is part of the Laboratorio de Institucionalidad Compartida (The Laboratory of Shared Institutionalism, LIC), a space for the Museo Reina Sofía’s research, work and advocacy centred on developing, experimenting with and systemising practices, protocols and tools which contribute to a fairer and more liveable cultural ecosystem.
For many years now, so-called infrastructural critique in museums questions material, legal and economic infrastructures, among others, as well as the forms of solidarity and practices required to sustain the cultural ecosystem. By approaching current debates, S.T.I.L.O. raises questions on the ways in which organisations define and interpret their practices, organise their relations and respond to the social contexts in which they operate.
The school gathers four cultural organisations that work via different institutional models – scale, contexts, conditions, different working models — with the goal of pooling common strategies and tools of organisation, advocacy and relationships with local communities.
The programme is conceived as a collaborative process with the participation of Arika, La Revuelta, BAK Basecamp and The Tentacular Museum (Museo Reina Sofía) and is structured around preparatory online sessions and an in-person seminar in Madrid.
S.T.I.L.O. is an activity framed inside the working strand of Situated Organisations from L'Internationale’s Museum of the Commons project, which reflects on the role of museums and art organisations as actors within complex social networks and ecosystems, with a view to exploring new ways to democratise institutions and make them more open, inclusive and useful.