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30 April - 27 June, 2014
Course
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30 April, 21 May, 4-5 June, 11 June, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and Protocol Room
Conferences
Access: Free, until full capacity is reached
Gerald Raunig. Revolution as an Expressive Machine
Date: 30 April, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200.
Marcelo Expósito, Tamara Díaz and Nociones Comunes team. Introduction to the exhibition Playgrounds
Date: 21 may, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Alan W. Moore. NYC Art '80s: Space, Permission, Aspiration
Date: 4 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Oliver Ressler. Spatial Occupations
Date: 5 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Adrià Rodríguez and Lilia Weslaty, in conversation. Kairós. Reinventing Democracy in the Mediterranean
Date: 11 June, 7 p.m.
Location: Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Political Imagination
Held on 30 Apr, 07, 14, 21, 28 May, 04, 05, 11, 18, 25 Jun 2014
The relationship between art and play has always been interpreted ambiguously. On the one side, via Friedrich Schiller's romantic thought, play entails freedom from ties to reason and the promise of connections with a world distanced from norms and codes. On the other side, it connects with public festivals and carnival, which, as Mijail Bajtin wrote, form a temporary space fenced in by ordered chaos. This ambiguity echoes the English polysemy of "play", between abiding by the rules of the "game" and the intuitive improvisation of "play".
This course and seminar, related to the exhibition Playgrounds (30 April - 22 September), seeks to discuss this contradiction and endeavours to approach periods of twentieth-century art through play as a space for critical intervention from which to try out a new public sphere, proposing other relationships and subjectivities that enable play to be considered as the exercise of creative and political imagination. Thus, it is no coincidence that Courbet's realist stance coincided with and participated in the libertarian utopia of the Paris Commune at the origins of modernity in 1871, that Giacometti's squares echo the atavistic world upheld by the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, or that Guy Debord's cartography transmits the social convulsions of May '68. Equally, the return of protest in the present day appears to confront a new power system that is no longer solely based on show, but rather on participation and relationships. Play elucidates another sociability, spontaneous cities based on affection and care that replace the factory city that characterised the 20th century.
With participation from Gerald Raunig, Luis Navarro, Marcelo Expósito and Paloma Blanco, among others, The Political Imagination combines a series of classes, with free registration, and public conferences. The course is divided into two parts: the first focuses on a historical review that draws on basic references from Avant-garde art; while the second offers a current look at different artistic interventions that have traversed and transformed public space over the past three decades.
Participants
Tamara Díaz. Researcher, curator and coordinator of the Museo Reina Sofía Curatorial Department. Co-curator and coordinator of the exhibition Playgrounds.
Marcelo Expósito. An artist and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Cuenca, and the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA. Member of the Scientific Committee for the exhibition Playgrounds. He has also edited, among other publications: Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Universidad de Salamanca, 2001), Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2008) and Los nuevos productivismos (MACBA/Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2010).
Common Notions. A self-education project that revolves around practical knowledge and skills related to militancy and empowerment. Through different core themes (feminism, post-colonialism, technopolitics, global crisis and metropolis), this series of courses aims to articulate circuits of self-education and critical reflection on the fringes of classic channels of academic and university discussion.
Gerald Raunig. Philosopher, lecturer at the University of Arts, in Zurich, and member of EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) and the editorial board of transversal. He is also the author of Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Semiotext(e), 2007), Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (Traficantes de Sueños, 2008) and Mil máquinas. Breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Traficantes de sueños, 2009).
Oliver Ressler. Artist. His work comprises installations, projects in public spaces and film and video work that approaches themes such as alternative economy, democracy and forms of resistance and social antagonism. He forms part of the exhibition Playgrounds, and has recently exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Basis (Frankfurt), Platform Garanti (Istambul) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin).
Adrià Rodríguez. An audiovisual producer and researcher, he is currently working on the Kairós Project, video-documentary archive on social movements in the Mediterranean. He is also resident researcher in the Museo Reina Sofía in 2013-2014.
Alan W. Moore. Art historian, artist and activist. In 1980 he participated in the creation of ABC No Rio, a collectively run centre for art and activism in New York City. He was also highly involved in the artists’ group Colab and the distribution project MWF Video Club, between 1986-2000. He is author of Art Gangs: Protest & Counterculture in New York City (Autonomedia, 2011) and co-editor of ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery (1985).
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
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»? Inspir ándose 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.