-
December 11, 2015 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Presentation of the archive participants
Moderator: Marisa Pérez Colina (Fundación de los Comunes)
Those interested in attending must register beforehand at: centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es
-
December 11, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Conferences
Nancy Kranich. Reclaiming the Commons: Countering Enclosure of our Archival Heritage [30 min]
Digital technologies offer unprecedented possibilities for human creativity, global communication, innovation, and access to information and knowledge. Yet these same technologies also provide new opportunities to control—or enclose— intellectual products, threatening to erode political discourse, scientific inquiry, free speech, and the creativity needed for healthy democratic discourse. To counter such enclosure, scholars, technologists, and research institutions are working together to develop information commons that promise new models for stimulating innovation, fostering creativity, and building a movement that embodies knowledge as a shared resource.
Librarians and archivists have spearheaded this movement to counter enclosure of information commons by not only opposing access controls but also developing and adopting new, exciting approaches to sharing information and advancing knowledge. They are developing new structures that promote more open access to information resources across collections, platforms and repositories. Through these efforts, they are harnessing the power and potential of technology to democratize access, thereby realizing both the metaphor and reality of information commons. To move forward, a multidisciplinary collaborative effort is needed to advance information commons that adopt open standards and collaborative governance structures in order to enable sustainable global resource sharing in the 21st century.
Ariella Azoulay. Procedurally Speaking: No Archives of the Common Without Trans-Border Restitution [30 min]
With the creation of state archives, we have been made foreign, often untrusted guests to the archives. Performing our right to these archives is one way to demonstrate that archives are not about the past but about the common. Under five centuries old imperial condition, this right can practically be performed mainly by citizens or residents of sovereign states. It can hardly be practiced by people living in formerly colonized countries in which, during centuries of imperial rule, cultural treasures were looted and expropriated, and much of this plunder was transferred and continued to be stored and displayed in archives and museums of the former imperial powers. Under the imperial condition, the dispossession of those people from their art objects and cultural infrastructures and from archival documents they have right to use, has been followed by system of borders and fences that deprive former colonized subjects from access to the sites where these treasures are stored. Under this condition, a claim to have archives of the commons, should be inseparable from the claim to restitute portions of these archives to the countries where the looting, plunder, and expropriation took place.
Break
Jorge Reina Schement. Meeting the Challenge of Meaningful Access: Connectivity, Capability, Content, and Context [30 min]
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to share information in new and expanded ways. But making information available in any given format will not, by itself, guarantee meaningful access, especially for those groups lacking or not familiar with the technologies of access necessary to retrieve the information. A community must marshal resources to make the most of the potential offered by access. For communities to exploit the benefits of access, they must mobilize connectivity, capability, content, and context—the 4C's of access.
By conceptualizing the Internet as a pluralistic domain that includes the broader context in which technical components are embedded, we explicitly connect social with technical to conceptualize the Internet as an interdependent, socio-technical network. In so doing, we emphasize the importance of context in determining community-level interventions, as well as recognize the inherent difficulty in developing “best practices” that can be applied validly across diverse settings. Thus, the goal of connectivity, which is at the heart of most policies aimed at increasing access and, represents but a small first step toward functional access and empowerment. Capability, content, and context must be woven into any strategy seeking to achieve a better informational future for all.
William Gambetta. Archives of movement: between cultural reflection and social unrest [30 min]
If memory is a way of building social domination in the field of the imaginary and the symbolic, then the archive of movements, which has played a vital role in history but has also been defeated as a political actor capable of organising the prevalent institutionalism in production and its conservation, must operate with diverse constructed logics. These are defined and implemented in the specific conditions in which this dispute is disentangled by a sense of past and present. In these times of marked social unrest, of vast technological innovations and intense mutations in social actors’ political subjectivity, the archive of movements becomes a greater problem in inventing the future in terms of collective action and the activation of social energy. Therefore, this memory of movements is paramount to debating the possible lines of action aimed at inventing other forms of institutional, social and political organisation and other models of co-existence and human relationality.
The task of archives of movements is to keep spaces for reflection and social constitution open - these have been historically opened in order to use the repository of experience in the debate on the possible directions of social transformation in the present. The activation of these repositories of experience has ties to cartography, commitment and the accessibility of the materials, narratives and micro-histories belonging to those involved in their existence. The fragmentary nature and dispersion of movements have not historically implied either a lack of coherence or intelligibility in contributions to social transformation; thus the archive of movements represents a basic mechanism of social constitution today.
Question and answer session
-
December 12, 2015 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Workshop Sessions
Archive policies and forms of institution
10:00 - 12:00 a.m.
Moderator: Mela Dávila (Museo Reina Sofía)
The archives of the commons must be imagined beyond the principles of exclusive and identity heritage, simultaneously combining the reality of being founded in local and politically positioned experience and the chance to be appropriated, activated and distributed in different modes, without its value being spuriously perverted. Accordingly, it must redefine its institutional structure and conceptual architecture, adapting to this collective, conceivable, open and variable nature.
Archive economies
12:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Moderator: Mabel Tapia (Red Conceptualismos del Sur)
The State has traditionally been the guarantor of material continuity and the archive economy, with this presence one of its defining characteristics. The archives of the commons is based on the withdrawal of this guarantee, yet it also has to search for logics of continuity and dissemination in a context of institutional instability, economic insecurity and the discontinuity of the specific agents it is founded upon.
Techno-political mechanisms of the common archive
4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Moderator: Roxu Álvarez (Fundación de los Comunes)
Technological forms of archive cannot be separated from their political dimension; the Internet has become an archive in one of the central battlefields in contemporary societies. The generation of technological devices enabling exposure, hybrid and changeable taxonomies, and their collective production, as well as universal access, is a condition of possibility for the archives of the commons.
-
December 12, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Round-table Discussion. The future of memory and the expropriation of the political sense of the present
Participants: Nancy Kranich, Ariella Azoulay, Jorge Reina Schement, William Gambetta and representants of the archives participants
Moderator: Carlos Prieto del Campo (Museo Reina Sofía)
Archives of the commons
Held on 11, 12 Dec 2015
In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse. This line of research into the archive and memory of subordinate and dominant groups sets forth a powerful line of reflection on new political rights and the new characteristics of a genuinely democratic sphere that is currently traversed by a multifactorial sense of crisis with far-reaching effects on the types of collective behaviour in our societies.
Archives of the commons shines a spotlight on these debates and lines of work in an international seminar organised into tables for discussion and public presentations. It is structured around three core principles of reflection: the archive models and institutional forms that make it possible, laying out a broad cartography of repository initiatives created between the 1970s and the present day; the economies of archive and the methods and protocols that ensure its dissemination and sustainability; the possible techno-political tools for undertaking its organisation, conceived as instruments that guarantee exposure, dynamic taxonomies and universal access, an indispensable condition of common archives. Therefore, the seminar will address institutional, technological and economic models that promote the different archives brought together, transversally debating these divergent records of experience and thought via the synthesis of the local and international, the individual and the collective.
With support from the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación de los Comunes and Red Conceptualismos del Sur
With the support of
Más actividades
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.