Julie Doucet, cartoon strip from What an Intense City, 1992. ©Julie Doucet
Held on 30 Apr 2024
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This latest instalment centres on the work of Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), a key artist in the development of underground comics in North America at the end of the twentieth century. The encounter features the participation of Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz and Camille Vannier.
During her university years in Quebec, in the late 1980s, Doucet began to disseminate her first comic strips in fanzines, magazines and in the self-edited, photocopied publication Dirty Plotte. Her work caught the eye of publications such as Weirdo magazine, created by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quaterly, which, under the above-mentioned title Dirty Plotte, gathered and published, in magazine format, her cartoon strips from 1991 to 1998. It was with Drawn & Quaterly that My New York Diary (1999) first appeared, one of her standout works and an example of her transgressive style with an undercurrent of finesse and melancholy.
Carrying on the legacy of the comix underground of women cartoonists from the 1970s — with pioneering artists such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Diane Noomin and Trina Robbins, and publications like Wimmen’s Comix (1972–1992), Twisted Sisters (1976–1994) and Tits & Clits (1973–1979) — Julie Doucet’s cartoon strips display unreserved feminism which does not shy away from tackling themes such as sexuality, menstruation or the risqué obsessions that take hold of the female cartoonist through her oneiric subconscious. All of which is channelled through a variegated, explosive graphic art, in the expressionistic black and white Doucet pointedly uses to transmit, or rather scream out, her concerns, observations and insecurities. The transgressive themes of her work have sparked controversy even within the feminist movement, with certain specialist bookshops refusing to sell her works, considering their content to be violent towards women.
Around the year 2000, she began to move away from the world of comics, working, from that point on, in disciplines such as illustration, collage and poetry. Nevertheless, she remains a reference point in contemporary autobiographical comics, her work splicing previous and more recent generations. The comprehensive publication of her comics by the publisher Fulgencio Pimentel between 2015 and 2017 has contributed to her recognition in a Spanish-language context.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Centro José Guerrero (Provincial Council of Granada) and La Madraza. Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (University of Granada)
Collaboration
illycaffè
Acknowledgements
Editorial Fulgencio Pimentel
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Julie Doucet is a cartoonist and artist. She studied Graphic Art at the Université du Québec and began to self-publish her first cartoon strips at the end of the 1980s. Her work has been honoured with the Harvey Award for Best New Talent, in 1981, the Canadian Comic Book Hall of Fame Award, in 2017, and the Grand Prix del Festival de Angoulême, in 2022. Since moving away from the world of comics — only returning sporadically in projects such as My New York Diary (2010), in collaboration with film-maker Michael Gondry — she has developed her work in spheres such as collage, in Journal (L’Association, 2004) and J comme Je: Essais d’autobiographie (Seuil, 2006), and poetry, with À l’école de l’amour (L’Oie de Cravan, 2006).In 2022, she returned to the realm of comics with El río, published in Spanish by Fulgencio Pimentel.
Raquel Jimeno coordinates the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural and Audiovisual Activities
Regina López Muñoz is a literary translator who specialises in comic books. She has translated over 150 titles for publishers such as Salamandra Graphic, Fulgencio Pimentel, Sapristi and Blackie Books, and the authors she has translated to Spanish most notably include Nine Antico, Joann Sfar, Zuzu, Lizzy Stewart, Julia Wertz, David B., Posy Simmonds, Gipi, Olivier Schrauwen, Manuele Fior, Igort, Sarah Glidden and Raymond Briggs. She also teaches course and workshops and participates in encounters with authors.
Camille Vannier is a visual artist and illustrator who has worked for journals and magazines such as El Jueves, Vice and Pandora Magazine. Furthermore, she has published different graphic novels in which she narrates personal stories and the environment surrounding her, for instance El horno no funciona (Sins Entido, 2011), Tuerca y Tornillo (Apa-Apa Cómics, 2013), Poulou y el resto de mi familia (Sapristi, 2018) and Imbécil (Caramba, 2024).
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.