La Columna Durruti, Scorpion and Felix. Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400, Museo Reina Sofía, 2020. Photographs: Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores © Museo Reina Sofía
Held on 18 Nov 2020
In a collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the Spanish premiere of Scorpion and Felix, a work by Buenos Aires-based La Columna Durruti, an iconoclastic collective carrying out performance actions and made up of Emilio García Wehbi, Maricel Álvarez, Marcelo Martínez, Julieta Potenze, Martín Antuña, among others.
The session gets under way with a conversation between the collective’s founders, Maricel Álvarez and Emilio García Wehbi, and curator and researcher Isabel de Naverán on Trilogía de La Columna Durruti (2015–2017) and other works by the collective explored through the lens of texts, films, objects, publications and actions. The conversation is followed by the performance Scorpion and Felix (2018), articulated around a reading of the only fictional text written by Karl Marx: Scorpion and Felix. A Humoristic Novel (1837). In line with the non-conformist stance of La Columna Durruti, the piece looks to provoke action-based reflections which interrogate the present.
In the words of Emilio García Wehbi: “We knew Marx the philosopher, Marx the economist, Marx the politician, but we didn’t know Marx the comedian. We’re not talking about Groucho or Harpo but Karl. Aged 19, Karl Marx flirted with poetry and the novel, and Scorpion and Felix is a demonstration that he could have walked down those pathways too. The book is a series of chapters in an unfinished satirical novel in which the young philosopher-to-be, already demonstrating his virtues as a polemicist, humorously discusses the theories of thinkers that came before him. In essence, it chuckles with an outlandish approach that we could venture to call a predecessor to Dada. It constitutes a literary heresy critiquing the customs of the era in the same irreverent manner Duchamp painted a moustache on The Mona Lisa. In some ways, the existence of Scorpion and Felix is a feverish celebration of the death of this scowling, proud and delineated Marx that history books and monuments in countries where Stalinist socialism reigned took it upon themselves to invent. In this instance, La Columna Durruti is guilty of committing the assassination of Julius Caesar, of tearing off Marx’s false beard”.
Curator
Isabel de Naverán
Force line
Contemporary Disturbances
In collaboration with
Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
With the sponsorship of
In collaboration with
Credits:
Text: Karl Marx
Concept and performance: Maricel Álvarez and Emilio García Wehbi
Artistic support: Martín Antuña
Photography: Andrés Manrique, Gustavo Gorrini
Bust creation in Madrid: Ignacio García
The song Whirlwinds of Danger (Warszawianka, 1883) by Wacław Święcicki and fragments of Marx Brothers films are used
Participants
Maricel Álvarez is an actress, choreographer, curator and teacher whose practice develops at the intersection between theatre, performance, dance and visual arts. She has worked closely with Emilio García Wehbi since 1999, and also collaborated with the theatre group El Periférico de Objetos and directors that include Alejandro González Iñárritu (Biutiful, 2010), Woody Allen (To Rome with Love, 2012), Sophie Calle (Prenez soin de vous, 2015) and William Kentridge (Enough and more than enough. A performative lecture about drawing, 2017). Furthermore, her works have been presented in the most prestigious theatres, galleries, museums and festivals internationally. At the present time she is a professor on the MA in Theatre and Performance at the National University of the Arts, and has worked as a curator on the Performance Biennials BP.17 and BP.19, both in Buenos Aires.
Emilio García Wehbi is a stage director, stage manager, performer, actor, artist, visual artist and teacher. In 1989, he founded El Periférico de Objetos. His shows, operas, performances, installations and urban interventions have been presented on, at and in major stages, festivals and cities in the Americas, Europe and Asia. His poetics attempt to confront disciplines and established aesthetic categories in such a way that his creations cannot be pinned down by any precise definition. In his work he focuses specifically on dialectics with the spectator, considering it an active part of the work, critical, violent or extraordinary situations, and memory. He has also won the Konex Award for artistic excellence, among numerous other distinctions.
Isabel de Naverán conducts research at the crossroads between art, contemporary choreography and performance in projects of curatorship, publishing and writing. She holds a PhD in Art from University of the Basque Country and is part of the research group Artea. In 2010, she founded, with Leire Vergara, Miren Jaio and Beatriz Cavia, Bulegoa z/b - Oficina de arte y conocimiento in Bilbao, a project she was connected to until 2018. Since 2017 she has been in charge of curating live arts (dance-performance) in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.