Seminars and Lectures

Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema.

This international event, which brings together researchers, artists and curators from both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to stimulate reflection about the notion of avant-garde in relation to the experience and discourse of modernity between 1920 and 1970.

Copylove is a research project begun in 2012 by Rubén Martínez, Txelu Balboa and Sofía Coca that attempts to analyse and represent the relationships and tensions that arise between the commons and love within communities, between emotions and community links. 

At this program, the curators Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec present the premises of the exhibition ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts, followed by an intervention by Simone Forti in the auditorium and concluding with the representation of several of her pieces in the exhibition galleries. 

French sociologist Laurent Bonelli investigates the economic insecurity, riots and police repression that define the backdrop of the existence of a large part of the youth in the banlieu, the metropolitan outskirts of France. This conference questions and analyzes the creation of the new frontiers (spatial and moral) of an emerging social order and the resistance it generates. 

In this performative lecture, artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the realm of ecosexuality as an expanded field of queer politics. The ecosexual community is a rapidly growing community that includes artists, academics, sex workers and other entities from diverse walks of life. 

When trying to understand the impact that artistic practices have on the public sphere, people usually speak of a confrontation between art and politics. In this seminar, comprised of a lecture and a workshop, Brian Holmes takes a step beyond this dichotomy, and situates art, once again, in relation to existential affections, forms of organisation, bodies and theory. 

In this conference, Anglo-American historian Peter Linebaugh explores the cycle of municipal occupations and urban encampments of recent years in cities including Cairo, Athens, London, New York and Madrid. Rather than discuss such events within discourses of citizenship or the public, Linebaugh considers them within the historical framework of the commons.

The new direction taken by political and social happenings in recent years has once again made public space an excellent place for manifestations by the community. In contrast with the situation during the last third of the 20th century, dissident action does not avoid urban spectacularization, hiding in private or clandestine spheres. Instead it transforms and is shown in public space. This seminar explores the use of “theatrical” gestures, behaviours and performances in social space for the purpose of expressing disagreement and dissidence, and it also examines the way that today's art, specifically theatre, has taken in and dialogued with these non-artistic theatricalities.

Closely connected to the Computing Centre, the visual poet, experimental artist, researcher, professor and writer Ignacio Gómez de Liaño is one of the essential references in Spanish art in the 1970s. This book of memories recounts that period's most important events and describes many of their protagonists. The book, the Spanish title of which is En la red del tiempo 1972 -1977, constitutes an indispensable document in any effort to understand contemporary art practices in the final years of the dictatorship.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

The main purpose of universities is generally understood to revolve around teaching and research, but these institutions also have other important roles that tend to receive less attention. This event looks at the architectural and artistic heritage belonging to Spain's National University of Distance Education (UNED). The collection is brought together for the first time in this publication, which examines how contemporary art has been collected, exhibited and supported by the university as an institution.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault suggested that for each model of power there was a specific way of organising sexuality and reproduction and that this organisation was concentrated in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the factory. All of these are now in decline, so we must ask ourselves: What model of somatopolitial administration characterises contemporary neoliberal society, following the crisis occurring in Foucault's clinic? This lecture is the inaugural event of Somatheque 2013.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This lecture looks at the interaction between narrations of social and economic recession and narrations of the visual arts crisis since the 1960s. Do these stories take place in parallel or are they a form of cultural critique? How does the economic recession shape the perception and production of contemporary art? Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University and is also editor of the New Left Review.

This seminar seeks to contribute to the discussion begun by the exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 (MUSAC, León, 24 June 2012 - 23 February 2013). This exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, highlights the role of discourses concerning gender and sexual identities in contemporary Spanish art, a topic traditionally ignored by historiography. The project, in parallel with the successive rearrangements of the Museum's Collection, proposes a rereading of recent art history in Spain, with different eyes and from a different perspective, recovering the work of many female artists who have been unfairly disdained.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.

Museum curators and international specialists gather to discuss the challenges faced by cultural institutions in their endeavour to activate and disseminate contemporary art. The seminar, designed to stimulate dialogue between Europe and Latin America, centers on the search for effective means of cooperation regarding production, research, memory and education.

This seminar studies audiovisual works that use methodologies and processes of a collective nature at different levels. This seminar juxtaposes three fundamental lines of work related to the politics of collaborative practices in the field of images: the audiovisual production of new imaginaries, the participatory experiences they undergo upon reception and a pedagogy of the collective image.

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

The Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is a research initiative by Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Banco Santander and YGBArt (Rosina Gómez-Baeza and Lucia Ybarra). Conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, its purpose is to engage in a critical diagnosis of the Spanish art scene, viewed from a variety of standpoints and bringing together many different voices.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

Eric Andersen (Antwerp, 1940) has been linked to Fluxus from practically the very beginning. In 1962, he had the idea of organising a festival in Copenhagen's Nikolai Church. Before that he was involved in setting up art-poetry networks throughout Europe. His participation in this Festum Fluxorum, as the most public and festive qualities of Fluxus were known, was the beginning of a long collaboration in an array of Fluxus events that continue to this day.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.

This seminar brings together Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Castro Flórez and José Díaz Cuyás, with the idea of questioning the construction of the recent narrations of the last few decades of art in Spain. The seminar engages in a critique of the interpretations of Nacho Criado as an artist focused on the idea of the collapse of language and on the idea of art.

A lecture by Anne Wagner, a professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of California. In the conference she puts forward a guide to the cosmos of artist Rosemarie Trockel, setting out from the study of a number of recent works in relation to the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: a cosmos.

This symposium brings together a group of art historians whose work is known for its interdisciplinary approach, its innovative methodology and its relevance in meditating on the way we think about, write about and imagine art history today.