Together and Rising Up
Transfeminist Struggles
free, until full capacity is reached. Some activities require prior registration
A red lightning bolt stirs Poland, and thence the world. A red lightning bolt, a tide of green handkerchiefs, thousands of bodies painted purple, the flap of multi-coloured flags, extending far and wide and flashing with danger in that instant. Uprisings that render an account of a time of promise in which feminist power becomes at once mass and radical, converging with other historical or intersectional fights, struggles of class, race and coloniality. At the same time, it is an historical moment that co-exists with a time of menace, where a new reaction attempts to advance on already conquered rights and diminish them, refuse them passage, break them up. A time in which mourning and celebration join, in which different generations mix and share the wisdom and experience of numerous women, share the irreverent and irrepressible passion of others. A time of rebellion in bedrooms, houses, on streets, and also in institutions. A time in which the museum, intersected and affected by these struggles, must take up its position.
The programme Together and Rising Up assembles a series of activities, exhibitions, rooms from the Collection, study groups, guided tours and digital projects inside the Museo, to be presented over the course of 2021, and thus reflecting the plural nature of transfeminist struggles and the complexity of new challenges for feminism.
Programa
With the Pink Triangle encounters, the Museo looks to consolidate a space of convergence between different agents working in the sphere of affective-sexual diversity and gender in schools. The third edition of the programme features the participation of Miguel Missé, a sociologist, trans activist and independent educator in the sphere of public policies for diversity. Setting out from Missé’s experience, the encounter prompts joint thinking around the concepts of identity and diversity and shared experiences that help to understand how these realities are lived in schools.
Design and coordination: Cristina Gutiérrez Andérez and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the Banco Santander Foundation
Territorio Doméstico. Politicising Aprons, Pots and Streets is a documentary audiovisual piece that records the history of the make-up and struggle of the feminist collective Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory), a group of domestic workers who live in the Community of Madrid but come from all over the world.
Participants: Vera Bartolomé, Justa Montero, Amaia Pérez Orozco, Mayo Pimentel, and members of Territorio Doméstico
Organised by: Museo Situado
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Collaboration: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Madrid Office)
This edition of the Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair features a master lecture by film-maker, poet and writer Margarita Ledo, who sets forth a reflection on the body as a remnant, as a point of arrival after tracing an invisible thread that extends across film based on memory, anti-establishment practices, the marginalisation of women in public spaces, the estrangement of their own bodies and the power of essay films as an artistic practice.
Programme: Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair
Force line: Avant-gardes
Collaboration: MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture conducted in the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre, in collaboration with the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM)
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the Banco Santander Foundation
They Wanted Arms but People Arrived is a radio series and theatre piece on migration and domestic work, written and performed by women from the Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory) association and featuring the participation of sound artist Susana Jiménez Carmona and the work cooperative Pandora Mirabilia. Its direction and mise en scène are overseen by actress, playwright and director Sandra Arpa. In the piece, the unwelcome experiences of three migrant women, Yuritsi, Quisqueya and Amalia, who live in Madrid, are narrated as they negotiate borders, deal with labour abuses and combine care with their own lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Participants: Susana Jiménez Carmona, Pandora Mirabilia, and members of Territorio Doméstico
Organised by: Museo Situado
Coordinated by: Territorio Doméstico
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing. On this occasion, artist Raquel Manchado presents and carries out a critical reading of part of her graphic art collection, comprising postcards, comic strips, posters, calendars, newspapers, magazines and other widely distributed formats published since the early twentieth century and which, under the veneer of humour, degrade women over their physical appearance or behaviour.
Programme: Documents
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
In recent years, the fight for trans* and non-binary depathologization and the attainment of their civil rights has questioned the debates of feminisms. The publication of the draft bill for Real and Effective Equality for Trans People, which broadens gender self-determination, sets forth a public debate that once again draws attention to key issues that were a decades-long part of feminist theory. This debate is set out as a conversation between people with first-person trans* experiences, their families and their environments in order to situate the specific demands of the collectives involved, and understand the key parts to this future law and underlying problems.
Participants: Aitzole Araneta, Rubén Castro, Coco Guzmán, Carolina León and Sabrina Sánchez
Organised by: Museo Situado
Coordinated by: Lucas Platero
Force line: Action and Radical Information
The mass victory of abortion rights in Argentina and its escalation across the feminist movement in Latin America contrasts sharply with feminist struggles in Poland, where the same rights attained in the past are now being curtailed. This encounter addresses strategies of organisation and contributions to feminist thought by activisms in different territories; proposals that are framed by the demands for women’s access to sex education and sexual health, contraception resources and the voluntary termination of pregnancy, in addition to the right to the free expression of sexuality and desire.
Participants: Sílvia Aldavert Garcia, Morena Herrera, Marta Lempart, Eleonora Mizzoni, Justa Montero and Martha Rosenberg
Coordinator: Justa Montero
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms is a programme on methodologies, tools and techniques in artistic practice. This second edition sees artist Carme Nogueira share her art-making as she revisits, with a group of people from Madrid, her project Tenerife (2020), engaging in dialogue with the homonymous film by Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar. The photograph of a laundry room taken by Lotar in 1932 while she was visiting Madrid in 1932 during a trip with Yves Allégret, in which they would reach the Canary Islands instead of Las Hurdes, marks the trail from which to interrogate the past and present.
Curator: Tamara Díaz Bringas
Programme: The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms
Force line: Rethinking the Museum
At a time of boiling-point and multiplicity in the feminist movement, Maggie Schmitt and Hanan Dalouh Amghar undertook a research process that started with a trip around Morocco in February 2020. This presentation explores the feminist collectives — and/or women’s and gender dissidence collectives — that are currently active in the Moroccan territory, and the practices, debates and challenges put forward among these groups and with Moroccan society, as well as the links that can be established with the situation in Mediterranean Europe.
Participants: Hanan Dalouh Amghar, Souad Eddouada, Zohra Koubia, Nadia Naïr and Maggie Schmitt
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and La Laboratoria. Feminist Research Spaces
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Programme: In the Meantime
This encounter will discuss the arising tensions in Morocco through the ever more frequent protest actions around sexual rights in the private and public spheres. Signs of this is the recent publication L’amour fait loi (Éditions le sélénite, 2020) and the mobilisation that occurred when four hundred and ninety Moroccan women signed the Outside the Law manifesto in defence of their rights.
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, Casa Árabe and Medialab Prado
Curator: Susana Moliner (Grigri Projects)
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Programme: In the Meantime
Creating string figures with Eva Lootz is the starting point of a series of summer afternoons which also include moments of viewing, listening, conversation and pauses; in which intertwined threads and knots relate body, memory and language. This workshop with Eva Lootz is the fourth edition of the programme The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms, which flows between methodologies and techniques of artistic practice.
Curator: Tamara Díaz Bringas
Programme: The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms
Force line: Rethinking the Museum
This activity aims to collectively create a fanzine to explore the representation of bodies in the company of Zainab Fasiki, a feminist draughtswoman and illustrator whose first published comic Omor (Things) explores the difficulties facing women living in Morocco. In 2018, she put together Hshouma, a website and comic on taboos in Morocco with a significant social and media impact in her country.
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, Casa Árabe and Medialab Prado
Curator: Susana Moliner (Grigri Projects)
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination
Programme: In the Meantime
Throughout 2021, the Study Centre will welcome seven residency programmes and two study groups to approach the different research projects situated in relation to archive policies, identity, memory and communal life.
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the Banco Santander Foundation
Benlloch called himself a “performancero”, not a performer, and his creative practice from the body was also situated along a “diverted” and “tacky” line of performance. In his actions and forms of writing, Benlloch crossed words, objects, actions, places and relations, affording us a resistant reading of art history between the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century in Spain. How can Miguel Benlloch be read without having met him?
This investigation centres on the social context of 1990s Madrid and the political potential of local club culture from the period: knowledge situated in the culture of performative electronic music and collective space shaped by different figures and nightspots in the creative side of social action, in addition to influences and conveyance in other scenes, sounds and activisms. The invisible yet central place of many female DJs in this scene constitutes one of the pillars of the research.
This archive project got under way in 2017 as a process to recompose and thematise the memory of the El Laboratorio Social Centre, presented at once as a tool to access history (at the crossroads of social, political and artistic movements in the late 1990s in Madrid through the Social Centre) and a tool of thought for the processes of transformation, creation and resistance in the city. Transfeminist stances were a key vector in configuring ways of making this activist experience.
Based on French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert’s collection of postcards, shared out among his friends after his death from AIDS-related complications, this project seeks to reinvent networks of kinship in the fourth decade of the epidemic. The accidental archives, epistolary activity and museum visits constitute gestures of resistance against oblivion, the growing distance of today’s queer realities and the complexity of their past.
In the framework of: the L’Internationale project Our Many Europes
This research maps out the network Latin American artists such as Raul Marroquin, Ulises Carrión, Flavio Pons and Claudio Goulart created in Amsterdam in the 1970s. As Latin American migrants in Europe and sexual dissidents during the AIDS epidemic, these artists worked from their southernness, placing themselves on the edges of the art system and using alternative communication and media technology like mail art, artist’s publications, performance, video and cable TV.
Gendernaut is the name that forms this multidisciplinary project started in 2018 and approaching questions around archive, gender, the body, performance and audiovisual creation, setting forth new forms of viewing transfeminist and queer narratives. By way of transmedia and performance projects, this non-binary archive has been conceived as a living interactive space, free from heteropatriarchical codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities relating the past, present and future to come.
In the framework of: the L’Internationale project Our Many Europes
This research seeks to study the modes of interdependence and the organisation of care among bodies of desire and discomfort — also between living and dead bodies — deployed in the context of the social and economic flare-ups in 1990s Latin America, marked by the AIDS epidemic, economic crashes and sanitation, and in relation to fears, collapses, and probable alternatives to the abyss of the present and its new normalities.
In the framework of: the L’Internationale project Our Many Europes
This study group proposes a collaborative exercise of legal fiction, with the aim being to formulate, on the basis of Spain’s Workers’ Statute, a possible Care Statue, voluntarily applying the customary labour law language and the trade union struggle as an appropriation that sets in motion political imagination and foreshadows future scenarios.
Participants: Marta Busquets Gallego, Silvia Federici, Luisa Fuentes Guaza, Graciela Gallego Cardona, Marta Malo, Helen Torres and Cristina Vega
Coordinators: Luisa Fuentes Guaza and Marta Malo
Force line: Action and Radical Imagination; Contemporary Disturbances
This study group looks at a conception of memory as an agent for deciphering and re-reading fragments and scenes, procedures and narratives, rhetoric and politics of the body and the image that continue to question the present with their performative force. At the crossroads between art, subjectivity, social discourse, culture and institutions, the group seeks to better understand the challenges of this tension between neoliberal operations fostering a forgotten past and the necessary political-critical retrieval of memory.
Coordinator: Nelly Richard
Force line: Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
This room displays the work of women artists whose careers started in the 1960s and 1970s and who, forgotten in mainstream accounts, have come to the fore through recent research. Two places form the major focal points in bringing about feminist artistic discourses: Barcelona – where works were imbued with conceptual practices — and Valencia. Women artists added anti-Franco discourses and social critique to their attacks on the customary representation of women, in which they were strongly objectified as much in the mass media as in the Pop Art imagery of many of their male contemporaries.
The role of women during the Spanish Civil War was at once active and diverse, most notably exemplified in Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912 – Mexico City, 2000) and Gerda Taro (Stuttgart, 1910 – El Escorial, 1937), two photographers who travelled to Spain to cover the armed conflict, disseminating their work in national and international publications such as Umbral, Regards and Die Volks-Illustrierte. In the sphere of visual arts, figures such as Francis Bartolozzi Sánchez “Pitti” (Madrid, 1908 – Pamplona, 2004) and Juana Francisca Rubio (Madrid, 1911–2008) created graphic art to the backdrop of war, while the role of female workers and militiawomen to serve the cause was broadly depicted in different media. In this room, two lines of ongoing research which are key to the Museo Reina Sofía Collection converge: the context of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, and the recovery of the work of women artists, often ignored or obscured by the output of their male counterparts.
The work of Charlotte Johannesson (Malmö, 1943), a textile artist and digital graphic art pioneer, is an early example of the conceptual synchrony between artistic languages and a technique involving computer programming and the loom. The binary nature of the image resulting from both technologies — produced both by zeros and ones and the weft and warp — facilitated the artist’s transition from weaving to computer-based art.
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Curators: Lars Bang Larssen and Mats Stjernstedt
The exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to Ida Applebroog (New York, 1929) is the largest and most exhaustive retrospective of her work to date. The selection of pieces, spanning more than five decades of continual work, places the stress on the interests and concerns that were constants across her life, such as violence, power, gender politics and female sexuality.
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
Curators: Manuel Borja-Villel and Soledad Liaño
Meeting Point: Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Education Desk
9 people
Free, with access via general admission to the Museo
Registration
At the Meeting Point, by strict order of arrival, from 30 minutes before the start of the visit.
A guided tour around the exhibition the Museo devotes to Charlotte Johannesson (Malmö, 1943), a textile artist and digital graphic art pioneer, and an early example of the conceptual synchrony between artistic languages and a technique involving computer programming and the loom.
Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Garden
Registration: only for one-hour visits. Tours organised at the meeting point in strict order of arrival, from 30 minutes before the start of the visit.
The 1930s was a paradigmatic era in the progress and regression of the situation women faced in Spain across all spheres. Women’s public visibility in the years of the Second Republic was strengthened through their active role in the Civil War, both on the front and in the rearguard, but curtailed by the victory of the Nationalist faction. This microsite, therefore, explores in greater depth the lines of research and acquired works that have given rise to the room Front and Rearguard: Women in the Civil War, and also features collaboration with different specialists who analyse the context of women artists and the most significant works from this period in the Collection.
The Spanish neologism sicalipsis is customarily associated with morally transgressive and mischievous eroticism, yet sicalipsis was also related to the price of bread, the workers’ struggle, feminism, changing gender roles and avant-garde movements. Sicaliptic women inhabited a territory bordering legality and illegality, hence their strategy of resistance in the recurrent use of dual purpose. This playlist also has a dual purpose: the tornado woman built with the neurasthenic woman, the wage earning woman built with the revolutionary activist woman, the highly politicised woman built with the apolitical woman, the traditional, autochthonous woman constructed with the cosmopolitan woman.
Curators: Gloria G. Durán and Miguel Molina-Alarcón
In this podcast, Agnès Pe assembles some of the cornerstones of the encounter held in the Museo Reina Sofía in November 2020 around the specific means that mobilise forces from the New Right. Furthermore, it centres around how to preserve the continued existence of emancipatory conquests, now under threat after centuries of struggle, generating spaces of thought from new feminisms, struggles for recognition and equality, and social and migration movements, among others.