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.
Ver programa
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.
Más actividades
Economy of Hate
18 ABR, 9 MAY 2026
Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
![Dias & Riedweg, Casulo [Crisálida], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/desafios-cine-2.png.webp)
Other Voices in Us All
17 ABR, 8 MAY 2026
A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
We Go On from Here… And Will Not Move
Thursday, 16 April and Thursday, 7 May 2026 — 19:00
This session advances a programme focused on the most elemental side of performance: a simple, direct act that starts from the self-exhibition of the body. At certain points, from the calculated serenity of Miguel Benlloch’s Tengo tiempo (I Have Time, 1994); at other times, from the challenging and visceral impulse of Bollos (Buns, 1996), by Cabello y Carceller, or the rage of Habla (Talk, 2008), by Cristina Lucas; and, finally, from video-graphic experimentation, disconcerting and sustained in the dance culture of Moving Backwards (2019), by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose mise en scène reminds us that it is not actually déjà vu but the present, unfortunately, that moves through a reactionary period.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas
Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April, 2026 – Check Programme
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.
In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.
The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.
Juan Uslé and the New York Experience
15 ABR 2026
Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.
The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.
Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.