The Feminist Genealogies of Artistic Associationism in the Final Stages of Francoism and the Early Years of Democracy
Round-table discussion
Marisa González, Estación fax/Fax Station, 1993
Held on 15 Sep 2025
— Conducted by Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in dialogue with curator Violeta Janeiro Alfageme
The starting point of this encounter is the birth of awareness around the artistic subject as a political agent and their capacity to emphasise their own autonomy within the sphere of visual arts. This acquired awareness, which came to light in a context of repression and institutional exclusion, was key to creating an associative movement which engendered the Union Association of Plastic Artists in the Spanish State, validated legally in 1977.
From a feminist perspective, this round-table discussion examines this associative movement of artists through the political and artistic trajectory of three core figures: Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in conversation with curator and researcher Violeta Janeiro Alfageme. Their experiences thus allow for a critical genealogy of artistic associationism to be traced, and its transformative role at a time when women’s subjectivity was excluded and constrained to the roles of mother and wife.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Angiola Bonanni
(Rome, 1942) is an artist, a painter’s daughter, who relinquished her philosophy studies to focus on making iron sculptures. By the time she moved to Spain, in the early 1960s, she had already taken part in different collective shows for young artists, holding her first solo show at Galería Neblí in Madrid in 1966, which featured a short introduction by poet José Hierro. She would soon become involved in the associative and democratising efforts of Spain’s culture sectors, and in the 1980s her work transitioned from sculpture to installation, and then to video. In recent years, she has been exploring issues of feminism, multiculturalism and immigration.
Marisa González
(Bilbao, 1943) is an artist and pioneer in the use of new technology applied to art. The reproduction of images and the use of fragments and repetition to generate form are constants running through her practice. González also trained extensively in music and visual arts: she studied piano at the Music Conservatory of Bilbao and obtained degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1971, an MA from the Art Institute of Chicago (USA) in 1973 and a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of the Arts in Washington D.C. in 1976, where she also received an End-of-Degree Award. Her art-making, based on the assemblage of techniques, has been exhibited widely at many art institutions, with over sixty solo and 150 collective shows, and her work is part of different major collections. In 2023, she was the winner of Spain’s Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts.
Violeta Janeiro Alfageme
(Vigo, 1982) holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her work focuses on the memory of women’s resistance movements against the Spanish dictatorship and on collaborative, community and procedural artistic practices which impact the public sphere. She has co-curated exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) (Móstoles, Madrid), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) (Mexico City), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (MARCO) (Vigo, Pontevedra), and curated projects at Städtische Galerie Kubus (Hannover, Germany) and Matadero Madrid. In 2023 and 2024 she directed the FotoNoviembre XVII International Photography Biennial. Her exhibition ¿Cómo continuar? (How to Continue?) [Lima, 2021] won an award from the Association of Curators in Peru. At the present time, she is putting together a show for Le 19, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain (CRAC) (Montbéliard, France).
Concha Jerez
(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1941) is a pre-eminent artist who has been honoured with Spain’s National Award for Plastic Arts (2015) and the Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts (2017). Jerez’s creative output has been prolific since the 1970s, starting from conceptual art and materialising into site-specific interventions with a strong critical quality. A performance pioneer in Spain, she has made an array of sound and radiophonic artworks, most notably those created with sound artist and composer José Iges.
Activity within the program...
Marisa González. Art, Memory and Commitment
Within the framework of the anthological exhibition devoted to Marisa González (Bilbao, 1943), this two-session public programme explores two specific strands of González’s life and career arc. On one side, the Nuclear Lemóniz (2003–2004) project, with the screening of an audiovisual piece made around the work, and, on the other, a round-table discussion on the associative movement of artists in the late 1960s and the early years of democracy in Spain, revised from a feminist perspective.
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Lemóniz through Archive
Past activity
— Conducted by Marisa González and Violeta Janeiro Alfageme, the show’s curator
Over the course of 2025, Marisa González has worked on digitising valuable unreleased videographic materials, hitherto conserved on video tapes. These images were recorded by the artist in 2003 and 2004, when she documented the dismantling of the Lemóniz nuclear power station, a work which recovered not only a visual archive, but also reconstructed a personal and political archive. Upon reviewing and ordering this material, González reinterprets and resignifies the past, establishing a dialogue between her individual testimony and the collective memory of the anti-nuclear struggle in the Spanish State.
The work shows art’s capacity to reopen still-unresolved debates, particularly in a present shaped by the energy crisis and its reactivation of old controversies. More than simply recording the past, this reworking becomes a critical tool for thinking about the present.
After the screening, artist and curator will engage in a conversation involving the audience on the meaning of retrieving these images, the memories they preserve and which of them fade over time.
The Feminist Genealogies of Artistic Associationism in the Final Stages of Francoism and the Early Years of Democracy
Past activity
— Conducted by Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in dialogue with curator Violeta Janeiro Alfageme
The starting point of this encounter is the birth of awareness around the artistic subject as a political agent and their capacity to emphasise their own autonomy within the sphere of visual arts. This acquired awareness, which came to light in a context of repression and institutional exclusion, was key to creating an associative movement which engendered the Union Association of Plastic Artists in the Spanish State, validated legally in 1977.
From a feminist perspective, this round-table discussion examines this associative movement of artists through the political and artistic trajectory of three core figures: Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in conversation with curator and researcher Violeta Janeiro Alfageme. Their experiences thus allow for a critical genealogy of artistic associationism to be traced, and its transformative role at a time when women’s subjectivity was excluded and constrained to the roles of mother and wife.
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