De-speaking institutions: three rehearsals. Rehearsal 1 – Museo Reina Sofía

Seminar with Olivier Marboeuf
Olivier Marboeuf, Le Musée du souffle. Peupler la solitude des objets, inventer un lieu qui parle, 2022
Courtesy of the artist
Held on 28, 29 Sep 2026
The study seminar De-speaking institutions: three rehearsals takes place within the framework of Olivier Marboeuf’s year-long research residency, titled The Rioter and the Witch: Rehearsals on Cultural and Para-Institucional Mediation. The seminar consists of a total of six sessions, structured around three essays developed over the course of a year. These sessions complement, inform, and engage in dialogue with the other activities that make up Studies Constellation 2026–2027. 
This study seminar is proposed as a space of collective discussion, exchange and bricolage around institutional imagination and craft. The proposition here is to take the experience and learnings of mediation as a vantage point from which to project, deflect, speculate and hallucinate other models and matters of cultural institutionality: forms capable of rehearsing alternative visions of site, work organisation, production, artistic practice and the circulation of knowledge, while redistributing interpretative and institutional agency. 
If we are to understand mediation as a bewitched practice that produces negotiated interpretations and narratives in which conditions of presence, interruption, recognition, representation and autonomy are brought into play through interwoven stories and visions, we need to reckon with it as a practice of institutional invention: a practice shaping who may appear, speak, interpret and narrate; which histories become legible; and which forms of opacity, refusal, dissonance and relation may endure. This understanding draws on long-standing traditions of storytelling, particularly Caribbean storytelling, understood as a collective practice of transmission and transformation through which dispersed histories, spectral presences and interrupted experiences are brought together again in situated ways. Each telling is a repetition with a difference, a reprise située: the past is reactivated, altered through the conditions of the present and returned to collective interpretation. 
Repetition, reprise, and rehearsal emerge here as a central methodological thread. Rehearsal is approached as a mode of knowledge produced through situated repetition, in which each rehearsal registers the material, historical and political conditions that enable a form to emerge, the forces that interrupt it, reinterpreted it, displace it —and the transformations required for its return. The attention is here on the political choreographies of these forms of circulation, negotiation and reappearance request, and what shape an institution that becomes the scene in which stories are retold and contested can take. 
Other methods and devices that animate this research are the interpretative community, the archive, and collective hallucination. Communities of interpretation are approached as a collective formation coalescing around stories, objects, archives and problems; a group committed to their interpretation, transmission and consequences through disagreement, partial understanding, and the coexistence of irreducible positions. Interpretation here becomes a collective practice of composition, sustained through duration, responsibility, and return. In turn, archiving will be approached as a living practice in which minor, diasporic and interrupted histories persist in voices, gestures, rumors, silences, objects, landscapes, songs; activated through the act of telling, when dispersed traces are brought into relation in the present. Additionally, collective hallucination offers another method for institutional imagination. Hallucination is understood as a collective alteration of the conditions of perception, emerging from specific histories, debts, bodies and conflicts, and producing other ways of sensing what an institution may become. 
The seminar will further explore Marboeuf’s notion of déparler, or de-speaking, developed in relation to cinema and extended here toward institutional and research practice. To déparler is to undo the authority of instituted speech, disorganise dominant codes of legibility and allow voices to deviate from the identities and positions assigned to them. A déparlante institution thus interrupts the confidence of its own language and makes room for noise, hesitation, multilingualism, opacity, contradiction and embodied knowledge, making room for plural and self-displaced modes of address. This movement is in turn connected to cacophony, as a mode of composition in which voices retain their differences, tensions and unequal positions, sustaining plurality without dissolving conflict and allowing disagreement to become part of the institutional form itself. Through this perspective, other rhythms of facilitation, governance and duration are incorporated, and a space for narratives that remain adjacent without becoming interchangeable is open. 
By bringing together experiences from different territories, this seminar aims to imagine non-extractive institutional forms that promote autonomy, while exploring how these might be translated and interpreted in different cultural contexts and economies. To institute, here, means composing a situation, sustaining a relation, activating a latent history, hosting an interruption and producing the conditions under which something can be told again. An art space may therefore emerge with or without walls: as a temporary gathering, a community of interpretation, a living archive, a mobile infrastructure, a wake, a souffle, a rehearsal or a circulation of stories, tools and obligations. 
Inside the framework of
Studies Constellation. Olivier Marboeuf
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
Activity
14 OCT 2026
Few figures embody the spirit of Madrid’s Movida movement quite like Ana Curra, a muse to artists from every discipline, particularly photographer Alberto García-Alix, and a free spirit for whom staying still and living from her legacy was never an option. 
Ana Curra represents a counterculture which still resists labelling and which opened new spaces to experiment with and explore the limits of that which is socially acceptable. Her influence is indelible as a genealogy of alternative culture and difference, whereby creativity is understood as a tool of self-expression and rebellion.  
This is the context of the room Material Counterculture, where popular culture, street life, club culture, photography, underground comics, design and posters take centre stage to offer a panoramic view of the Movida, as it is popularly known. 
In response to the Museo’s invitation to participate in this music series, Curra offers an ad-hoc concert, her music accompanied by audiovisual and photographic material by photographers such as Miguel Trillo and Alberto García-Alix. Furthermore, she will be joined on stage by artists who collaborated on her most recent record, La Última Cena de Parálisis Permanente.
Activity
From 19 to 28 October 2026
In needlework, “hilar fino”, or to work with a “fine thread”, alludes to working with precision and diligence, paying attention to the finishes and finest details. It entails care and skilled execution: sewing with exactitude, working delicately to achieve the desired result. In common usage, the expression takes on other nuances and is related to the capacity for precision, subtlety and acuity in thought or action. Hilar fino, to make “fine distinctions” in this sense, means to analyse in detail, ensuring secondary aspects are not overlooked and establishing complex relations through actions or words. The richness of the expression goes even further, for in certain nautical contexts it refers to the untangling of lines as they are being lowered.  
Such an interplay of meanings gives rise to this course, organised by the Friends of the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation, rooted in the Spanish expression “hilar fino” to reflect on Textile Art and on the precision and care demanded in its production and analysis. With origins tied to the Arts and Crafts movements from the late nineteenth century and a renewed presence in contemporary art, Textile Art’s rise challenges the traditional associations fastened to it. The reassessment of history and artisan practices linked to needlework is also a response to growing international interest, which is visible in museums’ new programmes, contributions from the publishing world and a rejuvenated interest in the art market.       
 
This course sets out to analyse the reasons for this growth: the exhibitions marking a milestone in this process, the role textiles play in contemporary artistic practice, how artists from an array of spheres are turning to fabrics, and the collections that are championing this age-old medium. There are many approaches and connections to other currents in today’s art, from the personal to the cosmic, to a vindication of craftsmanship and so-called minor arts. Textile Art has been reinvented from the unexpected, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary to reflect on issues such as gender, identity, community, politics, post-colonialism, race, technology and myth. A medium which demonstrates its full potential and the diversity of its patterns and nuances. Today, working with textiles is also a code, a channel, a context, and a form of vindication.     
To weave, knit, work with felt, pleat and sew have become, for many artists, ways of narrating the present and documenting an era. Their contemporary appeal and historical dimension relate to their place in art history and culture, and in the history of the media, society and technology. In bringing together traditions present in both applied arts and the fine arts, textiles are situated between formalism and functionalism, and, as objects and techniques, mediate between relationships with the self and relationships with the world and between processes of appropriation driven by affect and those that are knowledge driven.  
Functionally versatile, and as objects of utility and mediums of abstract visual language, textiles reflect specific frameworks which, since the dawn of modernity, have transformed the relations between subject and object, material and immaterial work, artistic and artisanal work, and the different cultures from which they originate.
As a result, this series examines the referential and analytical qualities of textiles through contemporary and historical works, with talks that put forth a reflection on the complex interaction between the different functions and connotations of textiles: the emphasis on their tactile qualities and artistic worth, the conflicts and clashes that articulate relations of power and value, and the interaction of artistic processes in their general contexts.
Activity
Thursday, 29 October 2026 – 7.00pm
This session sees Andrea Bussmann and the film-making collective of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko present their projects, discussing their films’ main themes and the visual relationships and influences in their conception. 
End of the Present (2025), by Andrea Bussmann, is a documentary essay that explores ageing and memory based on the relationship between the film-maker and her mother. The project combines recordings of their phone conversations and images from surveillance cameras the film-maker set up in her family home, thus constructing a domestic space imbued with distance, intimacy and observation. As a result, the film reflects on the frailty of individual memory and how surveillance technology transforms the perception of time and family ties — the home becomes a stage where notions of care and control are muddled.   
For its part, Hôtel Homère (2025) is an experimental feature-length film based on the Tunisian island of Djerba and its traditional association with the land of Lotus-Eaters in The Odyssey, the place where Ulysses and his companions lose their desire to return home after eating the lotus flower given to them by the locals. Across twenty-four hours, the film moves into a dilapidated hotel that was once a tourist complex and into other spaces linked to this geography, such as the local radio station Ulysse FM. Through the stories of the hotel’s former employees, radio recordings, and elements of experimental theatre and performance, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko interweave myth, memory and territory.  
 
Activity
Friday, 30 October 2026 – 7.00pm
This session presents two films by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko, the collective selected in the open call for the Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025–2026 to develop their project Hôtel Homère. Both films refer to the state commissions promoted by the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s to outwardly project an image of the country’s modernisation, and the archives these commissions left after the 1979 Revolution. 
Lovers' Wind (2024) retrieves material that Albert Lamorisse (Paris, 1922 – Karaj, Iran, 1970) shot for Bād-e Sabā (1978), a documentary commissioned in 1968 and narrated from the point of view of the wind. Lamorisse died during filming in a helicopter accident near the Karaj Dam. Here, this material is combined with new images filmed in Canada, Tunisia and Iran. The starting point of Chooka (2018), meanwhile, is the construction, in 1973, of a paper factory in the province of Gilan, an undertaking that would lead to the arrival in Iran of overseas engineers and their families, until 1979, when the Revolution forced them to flee the country. 
Both films are based on archive footage recovered decades later and view the Iranian landscape as a place where modernisation, foreign presence and fragmented memory cross poetically.
Activity
Saturday, 31 October 2026 – 7.00pm
Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto (2018) forms a coda to the programme of film screenings in the fourth edition of the Joaquim Jordà Residencies. The film is shot in the mysterious nocturnal environment of Mexico’s Oaxacan coast and unexpectedly transposes Goethe’s Faust (1808/1832) to this landscape and its local figures.  
Bussmann explores the language of memory, drawing from elements such as a camera with night vision, a journey to the sea and the distant echo of Faust with the idea of past echoes reverberating on the surface of the present. The inhabitants of the Mermejita region, close to Mazunte, inhabit the everyday, while embodying the characters in Goethe’s work. Metamorphosis, telepathy and deals with the devil — present in literature and myth — intertwine with the memory of colonisation. 
The film, shot digitally and transferred to 16mm, has a texture which is at once organic and magical, almost timeless, and with unanticipated imagery that leads to questioning the view of what is and isn’t real, playing with the threshold between the visible and the merely perceptible. In short, a hypnotic exercise of trance and the materialisation of dreams in close proximity to Faust’s own dream.   
Calle Santa Isabel, 52
28012 Madrid
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