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May 11, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Steve Edwards. Further Afterthoughts on Documentary (in and around)
This talk will consider the critical reassessment of documentary that emerged during the 1970s. The presentation ranges across photography, film and theory, but is primarily focused on work from the USA and the UK that sought to reinvent documentary practice as a radical project. Attention is given to works by Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin, and the Berwick Street Film Collective. The lecture addresses important differences and tensions between these new practices in documentary, offering a context for the exhibition Not Yet.
Steve Edwards is professor and head of the Department of Art History at the Open University, UK. He is the author of The Making of English Photography: Allegories (Penn State University Press, 2006) and his most recent book is Martha Rosler. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (Afterall, 2012). He serves on the editorial boards of the Oxford Art Journal and Historical Materialism.
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May 12, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
María Rosón. Colita in Context: Photography and Feminism during Spain’s Transition to Democracy
Did Feminist photographic practices exist in Spain in the 1970s? How were they structured and what did they mean? With the aim of offering a series of notes that enrich the virtually non-existent Feminist historiography of Spanish photography, this proposal is structured around the study of photography published by Colita (Isabel Esteva Hernández. Barcelona, 1940) during Spain’s transition to democracy. Understanding her photography in context, through her contributions to magazines such as Vindicación Feminista and Interviú, or in the book Antifémina (1977, in collaboration with Maria Aurèlia Capmany), enables the exploration of a praxis that moves beyond the author-artist perspective to offer a renewed point of view, not only of this photographer, but also of the relationship between photography and feminism in Spain in the 1970s.
María Rosón is a research associate from the Department of History and Art Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her field of research involves the study of the social uses of photography and the representations and constructions of gender in history and the cultural memory. She has curated exhibitions such as José Ortiz Echagüe: representando mujeres, tipos y estereotipos (José Ortiz Echagüe: Representing Women, Types and Stereotypes, CAM, Red Itiner, 2010) and Mujeres bajo sospecha. Memoria y sexualidad (Women Under Suspicion. Memory and Sexuality, 1930 – 1980), alongside Raquel Osborne (Department of Political Sciences and Sociology, UNED, 2013).
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May 18, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Rolf Sachsse. Engaged Photography vs. Photographic Engagement
Remarks on the Second Generation of the Workers Photography Movement in the two Germanies
Following the 1968 students’ movements, a discussion of leftish media politics arose in Western Germany within and outside the universitarian circles – from debates on the photographic war journalism in Vietnam to questions of self-representations in the new communes. In 1973, several groups of union-near amateur photographers were constituted on local levels, naming themselves Arbeiterfotografie in the 1920s tradition; these groups were joined in the late 1970s by a number of student activities. Moving nearer to the new communist party DKP at the same time, these groups received some funding from GDR administrations, which tried to integrate the Arbeiterfotografie tradition into their own photographic heritage. All of this was interwoven by a number of different theoretical approaches to German history, as well as in anti-fascism and new radical leftisms. The lecture will follow a number of these developments and show examples of the photographic work done therein.
Rolf Sachsse is a photography historian. Since 1995 he has been associate professor for Theories of Design at the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe; and since 2004 he has held the seat in Design History and Design Theory at the Saar University of Fine Arts, Saarbruck.
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May 19, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Sébastien Layerle. Struggle Cinema: the Medvedkin Groups and other Collaborative Film Practices in the Context of the 1968 Film Cultures
The French activist films of '68, inseparable from the social struggles of the time, are testimony to the fascination in the working class. This movement drove a significant number of film-makers directly into the factories, imposing new models of collective creation. The hope of seeing authentic “working class films” made by and for the workers, influenced the whole period. Thus, in Besançon and Sochaux the Medvedkin groups’ films opposed a spirit of social and cultural emancipation, illustrating, with great invention, a different way to understand the political creation of images. This lecture endeavours to evoke, in the context of the period following May ‘68 in France, certain attempts to take ownership of “outil-cinéma” by, or in order to serve, the working class.
Sébastien Layerle is a professor at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 (IRCAV). His research is related to the connections between film, history and society through the study of activist films and social and political audiovisual documents from the 1960s and 1970s. Caméras en Lutte en Mai 68 (Nouveau Monde, 2008) is among his most notable publications.
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May 25, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Carles Guerra. The Photojournalism of Meiselas: Mediation, Circulation and Revolution
Susan Meiselas openly revealed the cognitive limitations that besiege the photojournalist when they confront a complex event, for instance the Sandinista Revolution. Besides reporting and covering the facts, Meiselas introduced an unprecedented reflection on the role of the photographer in the revolutionary process, conceiving Mediations with this idea, a personal archive that took up the avatars of her own images published worldwide in the printed media. Just as the artist and writer Hito Steyerl stated, we are facing an early case of “circulationism”, or as Guerra calls it, a good example of “anti-photojournalism”. In either case, this work revitalises the critical potential of a documentary genre habitually berated for its servility.
Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator. He is associate professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and has been the director of the Virreina Centre de la Imatge and chief curator of MACBA. He has commissioned various projects on postmedia documentary practices, including Después de la noticia. Documentales postmedia (After the News. Postmedia Documentaries, CCCB, 2003) and Antifotoperiodismo (Anti-photojournalism, Virreina Centre de la Imatge and Foam, 2010).
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May 26, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Siona Wilson. Feminism, Documentary and ‘People’s History’: In Light of Jo Spence
Jo Spence’s work as a photographer, educator, and cultural critic belongs to a broader radical anti-professional (although not anti-intellectual) cultural turn in 1970s Britain. Building on the post-war New Left traditions of “people’s history” and worker education, Spence’s social analysis of photography and her development of a critical, educative documentary practice was shaped by the transformative impact of the women’s movement. This lecture will explore how feminist challenges to the long held oppositions between private/public, subjective/social, and personal/political are played out in a particularly significant way in Spence’s provocative work. In light of Spence’s heterodox practice, what kind of questions does it continue to provoke for the present-day proliferation of and social transformations in the digital traffic in photographs?
Siona Wilson is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Art Labors, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Documentary and Neo-avant-garde. Photographic Practices in the 1970s
Held on 11, 12, 18, 19, 25, 26 May 2015
The exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism (Museo Reina Sofía, 10 February – 13 July, 2015) offers a context for the discussion on the reframing of documentary culture in the 1970s and 1980s. This exhibition continues and expands the research for A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker-Photography Movement 1926-1939 (Museo Reina Sofia, April - August, 2011). Both projects are contributions to a political history of the documentary discourse in photography, conceived as a tool for the self-representation of working and subaltern classes in processes of historical empowerment.
The time frame for this seminar is the so-called “long 1970s”, a nearly two-decade period of expansion of Neo-avant-gardist documentary discursive production in a context of deep institutional and educational transformations in photographic and artistic culture. It starts with the late 1960s experiences of the confluence between artists and social agents based on using cameras in contexts of protest and ends in the late 1980s with the collapse of public funding policies for alternative culture initiatives.
Organised in six sessions, this programme brings together international scholars to debate key aspects of the exhibition from different perspectives: the early sources for the reinvention of documentary initiated in the 1970s; the impact of May ‘68 on the seminal experiences of the confluence of film production and social movements; the second wave of the worker photography movement; the convergence of Marxism, Feminism and Cultural Studies in Britain that gave rise to a constellation of micro-political documentary practices; the incorporation of some of these critiques in mass photo-journalism, and Feminist photographic practices during Spain’s transition to democracy.
Más actividades
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.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.