Held on 13, 14, 18 Apr, 25 May 2023
This programme, which throws into relief the sixth mass extinction in which our world is currently submerged, gathers popular knowledge and scientific research, focusing on marine life and insects. It zooms in on those species which, in being outside the scope of human perception, do not have the same visibility in our collective imagination as other endangered animals.
The title of the activity, When Destiny Catches Up with Us, is a translation of the Spanish translation of Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green, a futuristic vision of the year 2022, when over-industrialisation and overpopulation have pushed the planet to tipping point and caused food shortages. The picture is structured as a police crime drama with its main plot thread the commercialisation of the only food product the population has access to: the plankton-based “Soylent Green”. The film is based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, originally published in 1966.
Our present seems to teeter dangerously close to Fleischer’s fiction: in 2022, Scientist Rebellion, a sister organisation of Extinction Rebellion, warned that the planet had already reached the point of no return. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN), human behaviour has been responsible for the extinction of 60% of wildlife over the last forty years, while the “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi” report, published by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, states that two out of every five plant species are in danger of extinction. Furthermore, the studies carried out by authors in the article “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers”, in the journal Biological Conservation, reveal that the dramatic drop in the world’s insect populations could lead to the extinction of 40% of species in the coming decades. Out of the five previous extinctions, some hypotheses draw parallels between the present and the Permian-Triassic, an extinction that occurred two hundred and fifty million years ago and ended 90% of life through a huge increase in CO₂ in the air. This time, the sixth mass extinction is advancing ten thousand times quicker.
The need to strengthen environmental politics is nothing new. In 1992, the UN organised the Earth Summit in Río de Janeiro, a convention that would lay the foundations for the Kyoto Protocol, approved in 1997, in which industrialised countries committed to limiting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 1999, Bruno Latour, in the book Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, stressed the urgent need to place ecology at the centre of politics, while a few years earlier in Mexico, the Zapatista Movement had already started to show a determined resistance to neoliberalism and its understanding of the Earth as a space for trade and with ecological policies already put into practice that, from Europe and the USA, would later be known as the Anthropocene.
On the basis of the above, this programme — organised in collaboration with TBA21 — comprises the presentation and screening of a documentary, two sound experiences and two conversations that connect, in one way or another, knowledge around the global extinction threatening the Earth.
Thursday, 13 April 2023 – 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
2020: The Walk
—Screening and Presentation by Marta Moreno Muñoz
This encounter presents the project 2020: The Walk by Marta Moreno Muñoz, an artist and activist with Extinction Rebellion, which, as an international social movement, aims to influence environmental policies to mitigate global warming, the loss of biodiversity, the mass extinction of species and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Conceptualised in 2019 and produced in the spring/summer of 2022, 2020: The Walk is the artist’s final project for her doctoral research “Art as an Experience of the Dissolution of the Self. Towards an Artistic Practice in Times of Collapse”. This videographic proposal documents the journey made, largely on foot, across the four thousand kilometres between Granada, in southern Spain, and the Arctic Circle, where the artist connected with climate activists from kindred movements and disseminated the purpose and concerns of Extinction Rebellion, while also giving talks and training on non-violent direct action.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Xoán-Xil, Ariel Ninas and Paula Ballesteros
This speculative essay, based on attentive listening and our current perspective, revisits the myth of bees in popular Galician practices associated with death. Honey bees, a pollinator species threatened with extinction, have been among the most important insects in Western culture, both for their influence on the upper classes, in contemporary Western architecture and eighteenth-century hives, and their importance in funerary rites in traditional and rural societies. For instance, in Galicia, the buzz that bees make, reproduced through the voice, would accompany the dead to the grave. This activity features the intervention of Paula Ballesteros in the staging of the book Abellón. O libro negro das zoadeiras (A Central Folque, 2020) by Xoán-Xil López and Mauro Sanín, a publication that stems from a series of intuitions, readings and investigations around buzzing as a “paramusical” sound with the capacity to reach transcendental value in different cultures. This open and thought-provoking proposal is based on sound experimentation and creation, areas which prompt us to rethink our relationship with “noise”.
Friday, 14 April 2023 – 8pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Concert by Jana Winderen
This concert conducted by Jana Winderen seeks to showcase the importance of microscopic organisms which, despite being imperceptible, are essential to our planet’s ecology. Winderen, an artist based in Norway, worked on the research “The Soundscape of Anthropocene Ocean” (2021), the results of which were published in an article in the journal Science, with other artists. The text, overseen by Carlos Duarte, sets out the impact of anthropogenic noise produced by humans and the machines they manufacture and use, and how it exacerbates the extinction of sea life, already under threat from rising sea temperatures. These changes could wipe out entire populations of microscopic organisms, affecting the food chain of ocean wildlife and the production of oxygen for global survival. Winderen also studied mathematics, chemistry and ecology focused on fish, her practice focusing more deeply on sound environments and creatures that are inaccessible to humans due to physical or auditory factors such as water depths and ice or the frequency ranges which are inaudible to the human ear. Her work also includes audio-spatial site-specific installations and concerts performed in major institutions and international public spaces.
Tuesday, 18 April 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 1
Conversation between Carlos Duarte and Jana Winderen
Using sound technologies, the research group The Malaspina Expedition, with public funding from Spain and led by Carlos Duarte, recently discovered that 95% of marine biomass can be found in mesopelagic zones (lying between two hundred and one thousand metres below the ocean’s surface). Due to their diminutive size, these fish escape fishing nets and play a key role in biodiversity, along with plankton and predators. According to an article by Helen Scales published in The Guardian on 29 September 2022, the industry has been quick to respond and organisations such as AZTI (Marine and Food Science and Technology), which develops high-impact transformation projects with organisations aligned with the UN, have started to study the possibility of using mesopelagic organisms as a food for commercial fishing species to explore their potential in pharmaceutical production and animal feed.
Thursday, 25 May 2023 – 5pm / Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Lecture Hall
Listening to Oceans 2
Conversation between Txema Brotons and José Luis Espejo
When, how and why did humans begin listening to whales? Different cultures have heard the songs, roars and bellows of these cetaceans, yet Western culture — which has found beautiful verbs such as “clatter” for the noise storks make — still refers to the “clicks” and “songs” of cetaceans, even though none are exact descriptions. Herman Melville, long before writing Moby Dick, was said to have set sail towards Lancashire and first heard a whale, because many things are often understood through the ears before the eyes.
Listening to Oceans 2 is an encounter which brings together researcher and curator José Luis Espejo and Txema Brotons, a biologist specialised in cetaceans and the director of the Tursiops Association, to consider an archaeology of mediums through which science and other disciplines of knowledge started to listen to and classify cetacean sounds. The encounter continues with a presentation of some of the scientific studies carried out with mediums analysed archaeologically to understand the impact of anthropogenic sound on whales’ communication systems.
Curator
José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
TBA21
Inside the framework of
TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.