Today’s world of culture is shaped, on the one hand, by the prominent figures in the culture and communications industry and, on the other, by the diffuse magma of culture producers whose actions are governed by the subordination of their creative singularity. This subordination is manifested in artists having to sell their creative capacity or in their being expropriated of it. In addition, we are in the midst of a systemic crisis to which the museum is not immune. If the economic paradigm based on speculation and easy money has proven unsustainable, it should also be clear that the primacy of the building and of art as spectacle over the museum’s artistic program has ceased to be valid. There is therefore a pressing need to invent other models.

Museo Reina Sofía is working to develop various approaches aimed precisely at transforming the museum from a public institution into one that belongs to the common sphere, through the collection, the creation of an archive of communality, and organizing a heterogeneous network of partnerships with groups, social movements, universities, and other bodies that question the museum and generate spaces for negotiation rather than mere representation.

Martin Kippenberger