For an Archive Imagination. Session 2
Archives of the Commons VI

Mario Rodríguez Dávila, Las Fotos del Obrero (The Labourer’s Photos), 2022, Guayaquil
Las Fotos del Obrero Fictional Archive, 1922
Held on 10, 10 Mar 2026
Organising Comittee
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi, Sara Buraya Boned, Lucía Cañada, Marjolaine David, Maria Mallol González, Guille Mongan and Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Organised by
Agenda
martes 10 mar 2026 a las 17:00
Inventing an Archive. Fiction as a Tool. Methodologies, Procedures, Gestures
— A round-table discission with Bertha Díaz and Mario Rodríguez Dávila (Las fotos del Obrero) and Ana Kutleša ( [BLOK] Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum, Zagreb). Accompanied by Guille Mongan and Maria Mallol
This encounter initiates conversations on the tactics and collaborative procedures that arise from the absence or non-existence of archives, and their common ground in drawing from imagination and fiction as a generative element and one of possibility for archive in the face of its loss, removal or absence.
martes 10 mar 2026 a las 19:00
Futurity and Resistance
— A round-table discussion with Aída Moreno and Ivette Quezada (Casa de la Mujer Huamachuco) and Tania Romero Barrios (Warmikuna - voces, rostros y memorias). Accompanied by Lucía Bianchi and Marjolaine David Briand
In view of the seemingly organic nature with which archives are formed, this round-table raises questions around the drives and forms of resistance that produce (counter-produce) archiving processes. Both projects build archives from an eagerness to think of desirable futures from their difficult pasts and presents and start from the question on their link to time to alter linear narratives and vindicate the vitality of the archive as an opening towards the future.
Participants
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi
is a graphic artist, archivist and teacher. After studying at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) and, with a study grant, at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she has been part of the group Cuatro//// Intervenciones Gráficas and the graphic cooperative La Voz de la Mujer, as well as developing the collective project Romero Archive for/to come and the Colectiva Editora Des-bordes. She is currently coordinator of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, where she articulates research, archives and editorial projects linked to political memory and artistic practices in Latin America.
Marjolaine David Briand
is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and Bordeaux Montaigne University. Her research focuses on artistic and political forms of occupying urban space developed by artistic, sexual-dissident and feminist activisms in Argentina from 2001 to 2021. She is part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network Archive node and the team of Red Constelaciones, an activism and research project which looks to create a digital archive tool of aesthetics and poetics in street interventions and struggles from Argentina.
Bertha Díaz
is a researcher, teacher and independent editor who currently lives in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Research in the Arts, Humanities and Education from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Díaz co-directs the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones and is a member of the research group ARTEA and the International Network of Latin American and European Theatre Researchers (RITTLE). She has worked with art platforms in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama, France, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, and, through live arts, her work experiments with ties between bodies, thought and writings, focusing on their sensorial, affective and political dimensions.
Ana Kutleša
is an art historian, researcher and curator. She is a member of the curatorial collective [BLOK], founded in Zagreb in 2001, which aims to democratise art and culture, articulating resistance against privatisation attempts. In 2018 she started The Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum project, working jointly with the community from the Trešnjevka neighbourhood to build a virtual collection of artistic, cultural and political productions to vindicate the memory of people living in the area, a working-class neighbourhood whose history has been omitted from national archives and institutions.
Maria Mallol
works in the Tentacular Museum Department of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Directorship.
Guille Mongan
is an art historian, independent researcher, curator, teacher and artist. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts History from the Arts Faculty at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata (UNLP), in La Plata, Argentina, and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from MNCARS/UAM Madrid, and at present she is a PhD candidate in History at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales (IDAES) from the Universidad de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. She is a member of the artistic activism collective Serigrafistas Queer and the Southern Conceptualisms Network platform for research, debate and collective positions, where she currently works as a coordinator.
Aída Moreno
s the founder and head of Casa de la Mujer de Huamachuco, a training and community services centre for improving quality of life for women in Renca, Chile. She is an arpillera (burlap) artist, a Chilean technique of embroidering on jute, hemp and esparto grass, a practice, traditionally carried out by women, which narrates social stories. She has pioneered training as one of the cornerstones of this community centre’s activities to fight against poverty, discrimination and economic violence.
Ivette Quezada
is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research reflects on memory and the influence of artistic and creative practices in questioning notions of cultural heritage and the ways in which history in violent contexts is perceived and represented. Since 2022, she has worked in collaboration with the Casa de la Mujer de Huamachuco, linked to arpilleras and their creation, circulation and archiving.
Mario Rodríguez Dávila
is a film-maker, cultural manager, artistic researcher and co-director of the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones. His filmography has been shown in France, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, England, Colombia and Ecuador, while his works move between archive and documentary fiction, as well as the search for memory and individual and collective poetic-political history, with not only people at the centre but also exterior and interior landscapes and geographies. He is currently studying an MA in Communication Sciences at Universidad Nova de Lisboa, specialising in Film and Television, while he works on his film projects.
Tania Romero Barrios
is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, specialising in Gender Studies, at the University of Paris 8, and holds a degree in Quechua Language and Literature from INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales). She is a member of the LER (Laboratoire d’Études Romanes) labs and CERLOM (Centre d’Ètude et de Recherche sur les Littératures et les Oralités du Monde), and coordinates the multilingual museographic project Warmikuna - voces, rostros y memorias. Her research focuses on Peruvian literature in Spanish and Quechua, memory, political violence and Latin American feminisms.


Activity within the program...
Archives of the Commons VI
For an Archive Imagination
Archives of the Commons, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, is a bi-annual encounter which came into being in 2015 out of the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces of creation and care for memories. Its aim is to put forward opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as giving thought to experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, essential exercises of imagination and critique to articulate and construct narratives of memory in resistance.
This sixth edition explores the notion of archival imagination, understanding archive practices not only as the safe-keeping of past memory, but also as speculative projections and the creating of worlds. American historian and writer Saidiya Hartman puts forward critical fabulation as a writing practice from which to respond to voids and the systemic violence of colonial archives. This means negotiating and exceeding their limits, and reclaiming life stories to recount the present as a practice of freedom, that which “could have been a story told with and against archive”.
Furthermore, in their introductory text, Fernanda Carvajal, Moira Cristiá and Javiera Manzi, members of the Red Conceptualimos del Sur, allude to the Archives of the Commons III publication on archive imagination as an active willingness to reformulate modes of making archive. Upon interrupting or flowing beyond norms (modes of classification, description and automated practices), imagination works as an “inventiveness available to times of caring for archives and respect for the singularity of their forms, a practice which enables past experience to be recovered and reformulated to respond to the present, beyond mere documentary organisation”.
From a constellation of practices and experiences made possible by this notion, the seminar convenes a whole programme of conversations which address the production, maintenance and reconstruction of archives lost from or non-existent in imagination. The different guest archives share and reflect on the methodologies, institutional forms and artistic gestures that have unfolded to deal with erasure and destruction, as well as absence and emptiness. They are all horizons which raise questions around an archive-based creative power that challenges a hegemonic linearity of time and history and invents new forms of naming and organising in its making.
In parallel to the seminar is the launch of the international graphic art campaign Why the Question and Not the Statement Today? convened by pasafronteras, the Red Conceptualismos del Sur publisher. This campaign is understood as “a cross-border seedbed of questions to shake up the world, to activate archives, to open futures”, in the words of artist Graciela Carnevale. Contributions to the campaign will be shown during the days of the encounter.
Ver programaMás actividades

Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.

A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.

Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.

Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.








