Public Display of Professionalism, CISMA / SCHISM, film, 2018
Held on 20, 27 Jun 2025
The body runs through the centre of this second session, often via a performative presence that opens towards certain metaphors that trace ties to history. The selection here gives priority to less literal languages, where the artists’ different perspectives can be discerned. Güistes is a Salvadoran name for a piece of glass with different faces, the roots of which converge in Central America and its history, yet like seeds or spores they have been displaced to other locations and are fed off from there. Lucy Tomasino’s Piel y cicatriz (Skin and Scar) draws from the relationship between painting and the Civil War in El Salvador to set forth metaphors on conflict, mourning and healing; equally, Pulsión (Impulse) by Gabriela Novoa presents images that are manifested in matter and body; Variations introduces us to the life and secrets of Denisse, the artist’s alter ego; Public Display of Professionalism (a collective made up of domingo castillo flores, Patricia Margarita Hernández and Natalia Zuluaga) uses appropriated texts and images to build narratives on capitalist structures from Miami; and finally, Elyla alludes to vernacular traditions and practices through the colonial and cuirness.
Accessible activity
This activity has a space reserved for people with reduced mobility
Lucy Tomasino. Piel y cicatriz (Skin and Scar)
El Salvador, 2022, DA, colour, original version in Spanish, 4’
Gabriela Novoa. Pulsión (Impulse)
El Salvador, 2017, DA, colour, original version in Spanish, 6’30’’
Denisse Griselda Reyes. Variations
USA, 2021–2025, DA, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16’
Public Display of Professionalism (domingo castillo flores, Patricia M. Hernández, Natalia C. Zuluaga). CISMA / SCHISM
USA, 2018, DA, colour, original version in Spanish, 9’
Elyla. Prayer for Tending Death
Nicaragua, 2024, DA, colour, original version in Spanish, 12’
Elyla and Milton Guillén. Torita encuetada
Nicaragua, 2023, DA, color, original version in Spanish with English subtitles, 10’. Museo Reina Sofía Collection
Activity within the program...
“Kings of the Red Page”
Other Visions of Central America
Those who widened the Panama Canal
(and were classified as "silver roll” not “golden roll”),
those who repaired the Pacific fleet at California bases,
those who rotted in the prisons of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua for being thieves, smugglers and swindlers, for being hungryRoque Dalton. Poema de Amor (Poem of Love, 1974)
“Kings of the Red Page”. Other Visions of Central America is a Central American film and video series which paints a picture of how the synthesis between violence, diaspora and cultural hybridisation in the region is manifested in audiovisual practices. The programme, with a strong focus on El Salvador, has been devised by Patricio Majano, an art curator from El Salvador and a 2025 annual resident at the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), which is devoted to the study and dissemination of Central American Art. The institute was supported by collector and patron Mario Cáder-Frech and is promoted jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation and the Museo Reina Sofía.
Violence affects Central America, but does not define it. As a phenomenon, its roots are entangled in a complex interweaving of social, historical and political problems which push against all simplifying narratives. Thus, this audiovisual series approaches violence as a subtext through particular stories which avoid generalisation and which, at the same time, look to understand the complexity of manifestations and the origins of this symptom. In parallel to these stories of violence are other chronicles of tenderness, compassion, generosity and solidarity, as evinced by the feature-length documentaries of Marcela Zamora and Brenda Vanegas that open and close the programme.
Beyond the creative output which acknowledges the influence of violence is a whole dynamic spectrum of interests in the region’s visual production, particularly since Central American communities have been displaced and faced other contexts and experiences, a case in point being the diaspora of artists such as Denisse Griselda Reyes, domingo castillo and Elyla. Consequently, the forms with which each artist is linked (or not) to their Central American heritage are highly diverse, resulting in a melting pot that alloys different possibilities of existence as Indigenous people from this part of the world.
The title of the series comes from one of the verses of Poema de Amor (Poem of Love, 1974), by Salvadoran writer Roque Dalton (1935–1975), which heads this text and is alluded to at the end of Marcela Zamora’s Los ofendidos (The Offended, 2016), a feature film that opens the series. Dalton’s poem is a fitting synthesis on the region’s contradictions and complexities, represented here.
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Pardoned but Never, Ever Forgotten: The War in El Salvador
Past activity
On 15 March 1993, a little over a year after the end of the Civil War in El Salvador, the report De la locura a la Esperanza (From Madness to Hope) was published. Its aim was to shed light on the violent acts and human rights violations during the war. A few days later, the General Amnesty Law was approved, pardoning, unconditionally and absolutely, all those responsible for crimes committed during this period. For many years, this policy of reprieve and forgetting impeded the possibility of processes of restorative justice coming into existence, processes with the potential to address the roots of social injustice which engendered the armed conflict. This documentary cogently presents the stories of people who lived through these years of war, and the different ways in which they reconciled with the wounds and consequences of this past.
Güistes: Mutable Aesthetics
Past activity
The body runs through the centre of this second session, often via a performative presence that opens towards certain metaphors that trace ties to history. The selection here gives priority to less literal languages, where the artists’ different perspectives can be discerned. Güistes is a Salvadoran name for a piece of glass with different faces, the roots of which converge in Central America and its history, yet like seeds or spores they have been displaced to other locations and are fed off from there. Lucy Tomasino’s Piel y cicatriz (Skin and Scar) draws from the relationship between painting and the Civil War in El Salvador to set forth metaphors on conflict, mourning and healing; equally, Pulsión (Impulse) by Gabriela Novoa presents images that are manifested in matter and body; Variations introduces us to the life and secrets of Denisse, the artist’s alter ego; Public Display of Professionalism (a collective made up of domingo castillo flores, Patricia Margarita Hernández and Natalia Zuluaga) uses appropriated texts and images to build narratives on capitalist structures from Miami; and finally, Elyla alludes to vernacular traditions and practices through the colonial and cuirness.
Volatile Hope
Past activity
Todos los peces is a narration of childhood in the rural areas of El Salvador, where the precarious conditions in which children grow up are brought to light; the light also shines on the tools of joy and affection that keep them going. Although the central theme of this feature-length film is social and familial neglect and the situation children face in El Salvador, it also addresses the trafficking of children, who are traded like goods. The plot strand eschews tragedy, however, to put forward responses and resolutions of hope. Ultimately, an optimistic conclusion to a series of stories and visions of a region which, despite its tragic past, continues to flourish.
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.