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January 16, 18, 23 and 25, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Block 1. Doing politics with nothing. Territories of violence
This block presents the creative strategies of the human rights movement in Argentina and Chile, along with actions and productions by activist groups with such marginal materiality that they used resources such as silk-screening, photocopies and the body to process and show the consequences of State terrorism with its correlate of massacres, torture, forced disappearances. In various sessions, it explores how the modes of political action in the 1970s became, due to the impossibility of confrontation, the resource used in artistic tactics aimed at ending the isolation of political practice and provoking viewers by means of body-to-body contact in the streets. This open opposition and occupation of the public space would become, in the 1980s, the key elements that allowed for the creation of new citizenries.
Session 1
January 9, 7:00 p.m.
No me olvides (Don't forget me)
Tatiana Gaviola. Chile, 1988. Production format: U-Matic, 15 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Tatiana Gaviola
Somos+ (We are +)
Pedro Chaskel and Pablo Salas. Chile, 1985. Production format: U-Matic, 16 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Pablo Salas
Por la vida (For Life)
Pedro Chaskel and Pablo Salas. Chile, 1985. Production format: U-Matic, 28 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Pablo Salas
Presentation by Miguel Martínez
Miguel Martínez holds a PhD in Political Science and is a researcher in the department of Sociology II at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He specializes in social movements and urban studies.Session 2
Dates: January 11, 7:00 p.m.
Arete Guasu
Made by: Dea Pompa. Based on an original idea by: Lia Colombino. Paraguay, 2012. Production format: DV-Cam, 37 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Lia Colombino. Short film not previously released, made jointly with Museo Reina Sofía and the network Conceptualismos del Sur.
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January 16, 18, 23 and 25, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Block 2. Underspaces
The friction of bodies
This block reflects a series of collective experiences in semi-clandestine places, in certain "official" spaces and on the outskirts of large Latin American cities. New cultural manifestations linked to one another by the crudeness of their forms and by their total negation of official values. Later called the ‘subte’ scene (short for subterránea, underground), in this period creativity reached unknown heights, in contrast with the despondency and the brutality of the armed conflict in Peru, the military dictatorship in Chile and the processes of marginalisation in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Grouped around libertarian and anarchist discourses, and making use of music, the visual arts and poetry, these groups are characterized by their refusal to remain silent in the face of news about torture and disappearances, but also about the spread of the new market society. This independent scene choose to confront authoritarianism, repression and the social and cultural status quo, and it does so collectively through concerts, posters, scenographies, festivals and multidisciplinary encounters at universities, theatres and other places in the city.
Session 3
January 16, 7 p.m.
Punks
Sarah Yakhni and Alberto Gieco. Chile, 1984. Production format: U-Matic, 35 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Original language: Portuguese, with Spanish subtitles. Distributed by Sarah Yakhni, Brazil.
Grito subterráneo (Underground Scream)
Julio Montero Solís. Peru, 1986. Production format: various, 120 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Julio Montero Solís, Peru.Session 4
January 18, 7 p.m.
Nadie es inocente (Nobody is innocent)
Sarah Minter. Mexico, 1987. Production format: U-Matic, 58 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Sarah Minter, Mexico.
Alma punk (Punk Soul)
Sarah Minter. Mexico, 1991. Production format: U-Matic, 56 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Sarah Minter, Mexico.Session 5
23 January, 7 p.m.
Rodrigo ‘D’. No futuro (Rodrigo 'D'. No future)
Víctor Gaviria. Colombia, 1990. Production format: 35 mm, 90 min. Exhibition copy in DVD.Session 6
25 January, 6 p.m.
Pank. Orígenes del punk en Chile (Pank. The origins of punk in Chile)
Martín Núñez. Chile, 2010. Production format: various, 80 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Martín Núñez, Chile.
Frenesí (Frenzy) - Liliana Maresca - 1984/1994
Adriana Miranda. Argentina, 1994.Production format: various, 35 min.Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Adriana Miranda, Argentina.
Presentation by Miguel Conejeros
Miguel Conejeros is a musician. During his early career he was a member of the band Los Pinochet Boys (1984-1987), which pioneered a new way to conceive of rock/pop/electronic/experimental music in Chile and Latin America.
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January 30 and February 1, 6, 8 and 13, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Block 3. Sexual disobediences
The friction of bodies
In the 1980s various artistic experiences involving gender subversion and sexual disobedience put forward a critique of normative heterosexuality, and at the same time questioned the left-wing imaginary, by confronting the naturalized relationships of inequality, authoritarianism and subordination that support these discourses. This situation is addressed in Improper Behaviour, a film in which Cuban refugees are interviewed about the incarceration of homosexuals, political dissidents and Jehovah's Witnesses in labour camps, under the Cuban government's policy of Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). Many of these art practices were also a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, as mentioned in Dzi Croquettes, and to the continual stigmatisation of minorities. Through carnivalesque performative interventions, as in Pedro Lemebel: corazón en fuga (Pedro Lemebel: a fleeing heart), images of prosthetic alterations or encounters between non-normative sexualities, such as those seen in Batato's Movie, the artistic insubordination present in this block shatters heterosexuality as a political regime.
Session 7
30 January, 7 p.m.
La peli de Batato (Batato's Movie)
Goyo Anchou y Peter Pank . Argentina, 2011. Production format: various, 150 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Goyo Anchou, Argentina.Session 8
1 February, 7 p.m.
El homosexual o la dificultad de expresarse (The homosexual, or the difficulty of expressing oneself).
Teatro del Sol. Peru, 1990. Production format: VHS, 63 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Giuseppe Campuzano, Peru.
Pedro Lemebel: corazón en fuga (Pedro Lemebel: a fleeing heart)
Verónica Quense. Chile, 2009. Production format: Betacam, 53 min. Exhibition copy in Betacam. Distributed by Verónica Quense, Chile.Session 9
6 February, 7 p.m.
Conducta impropia (Improper Behaviour)
Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal. France, Cuba, 1984. Production format: 35 mm, 93 min. Exhibition copy in Betacam. Original language: Spanish and French, with Spanish subtitles. Distributed by Orlando Jiménez Leal, New York.
Presentation: Andrés Isaac Santana
Andrés Isaac Santana (Matanzas, Cuba, 1979) is an art critic, essayist, editor and exhibition curator. His publications include “Imágenes del desvío. La voz homoerótica en el arte cubano contemporáneo” (Ed. J.C, Sáez, Chile, 2004) and he edited the compilation of texts “Nosotros, los más infieles. Narraciones críticas sobre el arte cubano (1993-2005)”, (Ed. Cendeac, Murcia, 2007).Session 10
8 February, 7 p.m.
108 Cuchillo de palo (108 Wooden Knife)
Renate Costa. Spain, Paraguay, 2010. Production format: Super-8 and digital video, 93 min. Exhibition copy in Betacam. Distributed by: Estudi Playtime, Barcelona.
Reinas
Made by: Dea Pompa. Based on an original idea by: Lia Colombino. Paraguay, 2012. Production format: DV-Cam, 20 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Lia Colombino. Short film not previously released, made jointly with Museo Reina Sofía and the network Conceptualismos del Sur.Session 11
13 February, 7 p.m.
Dzi Croquettes
Tatiana Issa and Raphael Álvarez. Brazil, 2009. Production format: various, 110 min. Exhibition copy in Blu-Ray. Original language: Portuguese, with Spanish subtitles. Distributed by: Tatiana Issa and Raphael Álvarez, Brazil.
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February 15, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Block 4. Ongoing delirium and other experiments
The friction of bodies
The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries, an institution invented by Antonin Artaud in 1924, was conceived as a place where anyone could go to explore madness in order to reinvent life through creative activity. Taking up the idea of this key institution once again, in the 1980s different groups in Argentina decided to refound the international surrealist movement. Among them was TIC - Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas, or the Cinematographic Investigation Workshop - which produced a series of videos now being shown for the first time.
Along with these videos by the TIC, other films recover the imaginary of the 1970s and 1980s and put forward poetic and experimental creations. Homem-ave gira deals with the poetic universe of the Brazilian singer Ney Matogrosso, who during the dictatorship of the 1970s broke sexual taboos with his behaviour on stage. Mi Co-Ra-Zón, by the Mexican Pola Weiss, explores the body, with its organs, guts and fluids, through montages linking the eye to the heart. The block ends with Melquíades Herrera, participant in the collective No-Grupo, who, in modifications of daily activities, takes imagination, provocation and collective creation to transform the “normal” conditions of existence.Session 12
February 15, 7 p.m.
Detrás del muro (Behind the wall)
Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas (TIC), Adrián Rivero (Adrián Fanjul). Argentina, 1980. Production format: Super-8, 5 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Roberto Barandalla, Argentina.
El Chulu
Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas (TIC), Sergio Bellotti. Argentina, 1980.
Production format: Super-8, 20 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Roberto Barandalla, Argentina.
El amor vence (Love wins)
Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas (TIC), Beto Sánchez (Roberto Barandalla).
Argentina, 1980. Production format: Super-8, 12 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Roberto Barandalla, Argentina.
El loco de la carretilla (The Madman with a Wheelbarrow)
Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas (TIC), Eduardo Nico "Magoo". Argentina, 1979.
Production format: Super-8, 7 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by Roberto Barandalla, Argentina.
Homem-ave
Rafael Saar. Brazil, 2010. Production format: HD, 6 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Original language: Portuguese, with Spanish subtitles. Distributed by Rafael Saar, Brazil.
Mi Co-Ra-Zón (My heart)
Pola Weiss. Mexico, 1986. Production format: U-Matic, 11 min. Exhibition copy in DVD. Distributed by: Documentary Archive of the MUAC, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.
Venta de peines (Selling combs)
Jorge Prior and Melquíades Herrera. Mexico, 1993. Production format: Betacam, 2 min. Exhibition copy in Blu-Ray. Distributed by Producciones Volcán, Mexico.
Uno por 5, 3 por diez (One for 5, 3 for ten)
Jorge Prior and Melquíades Herrera. Mexico, 1992. Production format: Betacam, 11 min. Exhibition copy in Blu-Ray. Distributed by Producciones Volcán, Mexico.
Presentation: Jaime Vindel and Eduardo Nico “Magoo”.
Jaime Vindel is an art historian, a member of the curatorial team of Losing the Human Form and a participant in the network Conceptualismos del Sur.
Eduardo Nico “Magoo” is the co-founder, with Roberto Barandalla, of the Taller de Investigaciones Cinematográficas (Cinematographic Investigation Workshop) He has also published two books of poetry, "La Polaca" (1995) and "Puros por cruza" (2011).
Held on 09 Jan 2013
The expression the friction of bodies (el roce de los cuerpos) returns to the idea developed by the Argentine art historian Roberto Amigo about how the new forms of artistic activism in the 1980s in different places in Latin America took shape. If in the 1960s and 70s the linking of art and politics arose within traditional moulds related to the legacy of Marxism, in the 1980s that way of operating underwent a radical transformation. Encounters, festivities, the carnavalisation of protest and other forms of direct contact between bodies, whether in the private sphere or in a clandestine manner, would be the way to create a public counter-sphere in opposition to the devastating effects of violence.
Radical and libertarian attitudes thus appear, interweaving sexual dissidence, countercultural production, occupation of the streets, anarchism, social demands and civil disobedience or the demand that the victims of political disappearances come back to life, spaces and rituals that were previously invisible. This experimental wave brought a new way of thinking about and intervening in political happenings, using imaginaries of resistance and activism that favoured the building of new bodies and socialities, and the rebuilding of the emotional ties that had been broken by terror.
These film and video productions were made by documentary makers, artists, researchers, historians and people involved in these episodes. They include: amateur productions arising in underground spaces; works with the visual sophistication of a renewed cinematographic experimentalism; films of limited commercial circulation that draw connections between crisis periods by examining urban violence, music and drugs; and also new productions made especially for this exhibition. Using memory, narrative, recovered documents and images, and also musical production, this living archive of those events attempts to rethink the ways in which film and video have given a different visibility to a multitude of dissident bodies and behaviours.
Itinerary
Itinerary in collaboraction with AECID
Organised by
Conceptualismos del Sur Network and Museo Reina Sofía
Itinerancies
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
9 January, 2013 - 15 February, 2013
Centro Cultural Juan de Salazar. Asunción, Paraguay
2 October, 2013 - 14 October, 2013
MALI. Lima, Perú
11 January, 2014 - 23 February, 2014
Centro Cultural de España en México, México D.F.
19 February, 2014 - 4 April, 2014
Centro Cultural de España en Tegucigalpa
5 March, 2014 - 20 March, 2014
Centro Cultural Parque de España, Rosario, Argentina
9 March, 2014 - 27 April, 2014
CCEBA (Centro Cultural de España) y UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero) Buenos Aires, Argentina
3 April, 2014 - 9 May, 2014
CCE (Centro Cultural de España), Montevideo
23 September, 2014 - 29 November, 2014
CCEG (Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala)
10 February, 2015 - 19 March, 2015
Centro Cultural de España, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana
5 May, 2015 - 30 May, 2015
Centro Cultural de España en Costa Rica
17 February, 2016 - 24 February, 2016
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.