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4 October - 30 November 2023 Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Laboratories
These laboratories are articulated from the concept of ruin, interweaving the temporal patterns of adults-senior citizens and adolescents-young people with the aim of making a third transitory, mutant and anachronistic place emerge. As part of this consideration, the aim is to advocate the communication between the bodies we were, the bodies we are and the bodies we are not. From the sensitive dimension of touch, we transmit, from one body to another, the visible and the invisible aspect of “things” (materials, structures, surfaces, affects, sensations, images). Moreover, we experience the material and sound dimensions of things that have all but disappeared or been forgotten. Things detained, those whose “scarcity awaits”; things whose survival allows for two vital attitudes: attention and listening. vitales: la atención y la escucha.
The laboratories are structured around six sessions aimed at two age groups. In the first phase, each group will work separately and, in the second, both temporalities/groups will come together to continue the practices generated with a view to carrying out a stage experiment to be shared with visitors on the final day of the laboratory. escénico que compartiremos con el público el último día del laboratorio.
Wednesday, 4, 18, and 25 October - from 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for teenagers and young people from the ages of 15 to 25Tuesday, 3, 17, and 24 October - from 10:30am to 2pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for people from the ages of 60 to 80Wednesday, 15, 22, and 29 November – 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 2 with both groups together -
Wednesday, 29, and Thursday, 30 November Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Encounter. Not Yet, Still
Over the past year, artists Paz Rojo, Javier Cruz, Paulina Chamorro, José Luis Baringo and physicist Álvaro García have been meeting once a month around the book Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), by philosopher Federico Campagna. This encounter sees the group opening its doors to other people with an interest. (Enclave de Libros, 2022), del filósofo Federico Campagna. En este encuentro, el grupo abre sus puertas a personas interesadas.
From art, and more specifically from the sphere of performing arts and dance, and in the company of the metaphysical imagination offered both by Campagna’s text and other frames of reference, this reading day prompts a questioning of the modes of possible “worldification” (referring to world-building). Mindful of the fact that the job of art is not to predict the future but be capable of “seeing” the present or understanding future potentiality, what do we need to make it possible? Therefore, the encounter constitutes an invitation to think about this question and to ruminate on its ethical implications, going back to the sphere of the intuitive sensation of aesthetics and, consequently, picking up once again the Greek meaning of theatron, which alludes to a “place to see and listen rather than communicate”. To worldify, we need a theatre which enables us to develop forms of “opening our eyes” to reality after having “closed” them. Also bearing in mind that, far from being an active and conscious process, “seeing” is the capacity to recognise in us the wonder and mystery produced by listening to a terribly silent field: the encounter with an interior that was hitherto unknown to us.
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Wednesday, 29 November Sabatini Building, Room 102
Stage Experiment
TicketsThis experiment brings together the retrospective memory of senior citizens and the projects and plans that are inherent in adolescence and youth with the aim of establishing visions around a spectral future. Participants seemingly destroy-build a set design around them: joining useless objects or those which have become isolated from use, abandoned things, things that are waiting, forgotten objects or other objects accompanying them right now. Materials which make up a skein of cultural memories, of dances which are scarcely the shadow of a tenuous recollection, of voices and sounds that allow the melody to be heard, in which the lived, that which survives and that which is to be lived emerge.
The experiment is the result of laboratories developed within the framework of Not Yet, Still, and features Nilo Gallego’s soundscape in collaboration
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Thursday, 30 November Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Open Conversation between Federico Campagna and Paz Rojo
TicketsMorir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
Morir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
The idea of prophetic culture articulates this open conversation between Federico Campagna and Paz Rojo, together with the reading group and audience in attendance, to unpick the reflections and practices embodied during the programme Not Yet, Still.
Language: English
Held on 04 oct 2023
Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation, research that is part of Rojo’s broader project Morir Bien (Die Well), which draws inspiration from contemporary materialism and ecological thought to explore the encounter with declining historicity in the present time by way of the relationship between dance, the unknown and aesthetic experience. de la historicidad de la época actual, a través de la relación entre la danza, lo desconocido y la experiencia estética.
In the current context, besieged by crisis thinking and successive forms of epistemic violence, Not Yet, Still seeks to explore the dismantling of our time from the conceptual figure of ruin. What senses are opened before the presence of a time, a body and a stage on the verge of falling? Through ruin, we can delve deeper into the aesthetic scope of a time which, catastrophically and tragically, does not belong to us. As temporal and material figuration, ruin dissolves time for us, allowing us to start after the end: to listen to the remains, to what is left in spite of it all. Through ruin we let ourselves fall and contribute to the demolition of narratives and paradigms which weave our era; we open ourselves to the time of everything we are not and situate ourselves on a post-contemporary stage, ultimately experiencing an encounter with the aesthetics of a strange and immensely open time: a time which has, at the same time, a future and spectral quality.
Morir Bien Morir Bien is a project funded by Madrid City Council’s grants for contemporary creation. With the support of the residencies programme Notar, promoted by the MAR Platform (Museo Reina Sofía, hablarenarte and Fundación Daniel and Nina Carasso, Madrid); Radicantes (IVAM, Valencia); Festival Citemor (Portugal); Live Arts Laboratory, Tenerife Lab (Tenerife); the Los Barros Centre of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid) and the Notes for a Time Apart programme (Museo Reina Sofía).
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
Participants
Federico Campagna is a philosopher, and the author of The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013), Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He is an associate fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), a critical fellow of Royal Academy Schools (London) and a lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL (Lausana), as well as the host of the literary podcast Overmorrow's Library, produced by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. Furthermore, he works as a rights director at the UK/US radical publisher Verso Books and is the co-founder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo.
Paulina Chamorro works in the field of performing arts as a producer, performer and programme co-ordinator for theatres and institutions in Chile and Spain. Since 2009, she has worked independently and in collaborative pieces-projects which explore the creation of sensitive knowledge through experimental stage formats, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation, capitalism, expanded stage practices and post-modernism. Notable among her works are Ser Paisaje (NAVE, Santiago de Chile, 2021), Exuberante Hueco Hacer Lugar (Bosque Real, Madrid, 2022), VAHO (The Online Platform of Ongoing Research, 2022) and Una vibración casi imperceptible (CA2M, Móstoles, 2023).
Javier Cruz is an artist who develops his work through collaborative projects, both in his individual practice and as part of collective structures such as Elgatoconmoscas and PLAYdramaturgia. He also works with performing arts professionals, normally as a performer. Alongside Jacobo Cayetano (Zuloark), he created Bosque Real, a platform to safeguard forgotten heritage and to once again narrate it from multiple perspectives of retrieval. Moreover, with Fernando Gandasegui, he runs Bar Yola, an intersection between live art and pedagogies. His work has been part of collective shows such as Querer parecer noche (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018) and individual exhibitions like Trémula (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), and has featured in art centres, festivals and national and international theatres. (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), así como en centros de arte, festivales y teatros nacionales e internacionales.
Nilo Gallego is a musician and artist whose work always contains a playful strand, searching for interaction with the environment and everyday life. He designs tools and conducts education workshops based on listening and sound creation. cotidiano. Diseña herramientas e imparte talleres educativos basados en la escucha y la creación sonora.
Álvaro García holds a degree in physics from the University of Salamanca (2011). He is currently an associate professor in the area of Applied Physics at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid). His research work pivots round non-linear physics and chaos theory, classic electrodynamics and the foundations of quantum mechanics, as well as stochastic processes with applications to biology. His most recent works have focused on studying how extensive electrodynamic bodies generate electromagnetic waves through the phenomenon of self-oscillation. His research has been published in journals such as Chaos Solitons & Fractals and forums that include NoLineal 20-21 (Madrid) and NODYCON 2023 (Rome).
Paz Rojo is a choreographer, dancer and researcher whose interests revolve around dance and its potential to create alternative ecologies that include debates on the ontology of dance in late capitalism and the aesthetics of dance after the end of the future. She attained a PhD in Performance Practices, specialising in Choreography, from the Stockholm University of the Arts with the research thesis The Decline of Choreography and Its Movement: a Body's (path)Way (2019). As part of this research, she published the book To Dance in the Age of No-Future (Circadian, 2020).
![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.