TIZ 1. 8EMES

 This encounter seeks to reflect, through young migrant and anti-racist activists, on modes to destabilise racism from an intersectional gaze. What role does racism play in the multiple forms of oppression that cross through certain bodies in relation to gender, race, class, administrative status, and so on? The aim is to collectively imagine multi-faceted, creative, political and disobedient processes which allow anti-racism to be incorporated into the heart of struggles and thereupon examine its relationship with other issues that include education, participation in politics, heteromormativity and climate justice.    

Coordinated by: Red de Estrategias Antirrumores de la Región de Madrid (RAMA) 
Organised by: Red de Estrategias Antirrumores de la Región de Madrid (RAMA), GRIGRI and Museo Situado 
Collaboration: Madrid City Council

This Museo Reina Sofía-produced documentary approaches the unique work of Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940 — Azpirotz, Navarra, 2015), an artist who ardently explored abstract language in the field of logical thought and algebra applied to geometric abstraction. Her artistic practice — perpetually characterised by compositional rigour and formal refinement — stretches across a broad array of formats and mediums, from concrete poetry and drawing to video, via sculpture and installation. The film, resulting from research into the artist’s archive conducted over more than two years, is a multi-voiced account in which different figures seek to respond to the many questions that formulate a strict and demanding artistic practice, and which, as Javier Maderuelo highlights, is “pure mental process”. The documentary is followed by screenings of the unseen digital animation films by Elena Asins and a conversation with Javi Álvarez and Olga Sevillano, the documentary’s directors, in both sessions. 

The Contenedor de feminismos (Feminisms Container) is a sculpture and mobile archive devised and activated by artist Carme Nogueira and researchers Anxela Caramés and Uqui Permui and is part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. Designed to be used in public space, the Container seeks to recover, document and make visible the history of women, feminisms and struggles in this sphere. Since 2009, different “docu-actions” — a term employed to designate an encounter or dialogue between women, on a specific theme, in public space — have been carried out in the Museo around feminism and associationist syndicalism. The materials produced from this docu-action are incorporated into the Container to become part of its archive. 

Artist Andrea Büttner engages in conversation with Isabella Lenzi, a curator and research fellow in the Museo’s Collections Department. Büttner’s work is part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new re-hang of the Collection. This event is organised inside the framework of a series of activations of the Collection throughout the month of March, underscoring feminist artistic practices and the work of women artists.

In conjunction with the exhibition Belkis Ayón. Collographs, the Museo organises a tour through the show and a conversation with its curator Cristina Vives and Cuban artists Alexandre Arrechea and Luis Cabrera, both closely related to the figure of Ayón. The activity explores the artist’s short yet intensive career, shaped by plastic investigations around the Afro-Cuban secret society Abakuá, the practice of collography – an unusual printmaking technique developed by Ayón to create a unique artistic language — and the artistic and socio-cultural context of 1990s Cuba. The encounter is concluded with an activation on the process of conceiving and engraving the collograph and is conducted by Luis Cabrera.

Across six sessions, this study group seeks to investigate alternative models in cultural and art theory, and in artistic practices, which radically challenge the relationship between animals and humans, with the notions of wild thought, human-animal coproduction and the between-zone as core topics. Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities is the continuation of the study group Body, Territory and Conflict, held from October 2020 to March 2021. Its thematic programme is linked to the research project The New Loss of Centre. Critical Practices in Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.   

Coordinated by: Fernando Quesada

The Pink Triangle project looks to consolidate a space of convergence between different agents working in the sphere of affective-sexual diversity and gender in schools, with the aim of developing, in tune with the legislation in force, comprehensive programmes against LGTBI-phobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity. Over the course of this year, and in collaboration with L’Internationale, a series of mediation materials are developed around dialogue recorded between Miguel Missé and Mercedes Sánchez Sáinz, with the aim of sharing strategies and activations in the sphere of sex-gender freedom of expression and educational work for and from difference.

The modern city opened the way for the modern woman, who became a social phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet in Spain there was no cultural framework in which to professionally contextualise women in art until well into the twentieth century, making their history tantamount to a list of exceptions with vital specific characteristics. This room contains works that represent the determinants women faced at the turn of the century, for instance La comulgante (Girl at Her First Communion, 1914), by María Blanchard, and pieces which render an account of the emancipatory spirit that had started to take shape in schools devoted to advancing women’s higher education, such as Ángeles Santos’s Tertulia (The Gathering, 1929). It also foregrounds the work of illustrators such as Pitti Bartolozzi, Rosario de Velasco and Delhy Tejero, who all employed materials widely considered second rate by historiography to build a feminist or subordinate art history. 

This room presents works by two key artists related conceptually to Surrealism from Europe: Louise Bourgeois and Dorothea Tanning. Both would enter a liminal dimension, at once interior and exterior, of femininity, the body and the home, creating sharp contours to the violence of gender constructions and surveying their vicissitudes. To some degree, their treatment of the home is diametrically opposed to the American dream, where the suburban home, bright and always immaculate, is built upon an obliging and idyllic female figure taken for granted.

Displayed in this room are works by Mari Chordá, Ángela García Codoñer, Eulàlia Grau, Isabel Oliver and Ana Peters, artists whose careers began in the 1960s and 1970s but who, omitted from major narratives, have only started to be unearthed in recent investigations. During the last two decades of Franco’s dictatorship, women who were active in the Spanish art scene were seen as exceptions, their talent commonly belittled in critique and the media under the term “feminine”. Nevertheless, from the end of the 1960s this derogatory characterisation started to become part of the subject matter approached by many of these artists as a vindication of another kind of art-making and in resistance to Francoism.

New forms of governance emerge as a response from struggles against inequality, led by the search for alternative models, and perhaps pre-existing modes of exchange, with some based on the community logic that assumes the importance of existing in relation to others. This room displays works by artist Andrea Büttner which address moral or ethical issues linked to dispossession and vulnerability resulting from the structures of inequality and belief systems, such as religions, underpinning or confronting them. Her Beggars, portraits of beggars that make up one of her open strands of work, are woodcuts showing variations through the schematization of the beggar figure. The woodcut technique, unflashy and tied to folk art, establishes a parallel between artists and manual labourers: the artist as worker.

This room displays Victoria Gil’s series Retratos saharauis (Sahrawi Portraits), conceived to illustrate a book of poems featuring the collaboration of different writers from Western Sahara and which sought to cast light upon the socio-political conflict. Although the series is broad and addresses issues such as the acts of resistance before eviction attempts in the camps or the use and spread of tear gas, the pieces selected in this room allow us to view the agency of communities of Sahrawi women, leading figures in the development of their society across more than four decades of exile. In her field journal, Victoria Gil depicts daily life in the camps and grants recognition to the participation of women not only in the anti-colonial struggle and the fight for the rights of the Sahrawi people until the present day, but also in leading community activities to improve co-existence and quality of life and creating education structures and promoting health in camps for displaced people.

Belkis Ayón (Havana, 1967–1999), regarded as one of the foremost exponents of contemporary international printmaking in the 1990s, reached artistic maturity during the profound economic, social and ideological crisis in Cuba caused by the collapse of socialism in Europe. Ayón studied at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana (ISA) from 1986 to 1991, excelling through the mastery of her large-scale collographs — via an assemblage of multiple printed sections — with their pronounced stage-like quality and great compositional complexity. Ayón used these works to build a universal discourse against marginalisation, frustration, fear, censorship, intolerance, violence, helplessness and limited freedom.   

Curator: Cristina Vives
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Belkis Ayón Estate

Argentinian-Swiss artist Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949) works in the middle of the Guatemalan rainforest, her practice, carried out from her studio in Panajachel, evolving towards an ever-closer exchange with nature. Wind, rain and mud act upon frameless colourist canvases in continuity with the surrounding tropical landscape. Her embrace of natural phenomena in her paintings not only erodes the notion of material hierarchy, but also shows an environmentally aware existence. Each canvas retains its own autonomy as an artwork while maintaining a close connection to the rest of the pieces, amounting to a kind of evocative ecosystem of climatic, sensorial and emotive experiences.

Curator: Manuel Borja-Villel
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration: Comunidad de Madrid

Jardín de las mixturas (The Garden of Mixtures) puts forward a presentation of the work of Alejandra Riera — “a series of attempts”, as she prefers to call it — across more than two decades. How can the poetic modes practiced in these attempts specifically unfold? How can they linger over long periods of time and address the density of their fabric? How can it be done by creating places that make room for the transit of anyone who approaches? The Jardín de las mixturas is not conceived as closed space and time (the exhibition room and its programmed temporality), but rather as an ensemble of unique places linked by an open narrative frame and a certain freedom of circulation.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

This tour explores the spaces of the Collection devoted to historical avant-garde movements and questions women’s role and visibility in art history by means of an analysis of women as producers, recipients and subjects-objects of artistic production. It is part of a series of transversal tours that put forward new gazes of the Collection, questioning traditional interpretations and revealing the wealth of historical, social and political ramifications of artistic activity. It seeks to ignite a new gaze, to critically consider images of male domination and to prompt recognition of women’s work in overcoming roles and models.

The issue of space became visible on the artistic landscape after the Second World War with the rise of performance and its hybrids with dance, installation and reformulations around the support and materiality of artworks. This would affect not only art-making but also people situated inside the art system — Who occupies this space? — and those off-centre. In this meandering tour, taking in Episodes 2, 3 and 4 of the Collection, participation is encouraged in a relational practice with mediators and the rest of the group in an attempt to dismantle the idea of someone “who explains things” and form plural voices that will nurture word and listening from feminist perspectives.

Artist Charlotte Johannesson (Malmö, 1943) is a pioneer of digital graphic art and an early exponent of the conceptual synchrony between languages and the technique of IT programming and the loom. This interview, in conjunction with the monographic exhibition held in the Museo Reina Sofía in 2021, sees Johannesson weave together a tapestry of personal experience with her early approach to textiles, memories of political protest from the counterculture scene and her artistic practice at the inception of digital art. 

In this sound podcast, researcher, editor and art critic Cristina Vives (Havana, 1955) presents the short yet prolific career of Belkis Ayón (Havana, 1967–1999). Vives, curator of the first retrospective of the printmaker in Europe, held in the Museo Reina Sofía, surveys the narrative of the artistic journey undertaken by her friend, exploring Ayón’s work with collographs as a unique language, her interest in the Afro-Cuban secret society Abakuá and her political commitment in the context of 1990s Cuba.

Dystopian fiction, such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and real experiences, for instance Anna Ajmátova’s memorisation of her own poems in an attempt to avoid censorship, have inspired Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a proposal by performer and choreographer Mette Edvardsen. The project sees people from different countries memorise books with a view to creating a library of “living books” made available to the public in the form of common encounters in which they recite what they have learned. This double podcast offers an interview with Edvardsen as she recounts the beginnings of the project and its development over the years, and a conversation with Violeta Gil and Andrea Rodrigo, who narrate their experiences of these living books.

Across four summer evenings, a group of participants learned to make string figures with their hands in a workshop conducted by artist Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940). The string forms enable an exploration with knots and intertwining threads to relate body, memory and language; figures that can be undone and started again in another form. In this podcast, Lootz entwines a narration that begins from the outset of her artistic career and losing herself in a play with raw materials, memory, history and landscape.