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Friday, 28 October 2022 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400, Auditorium 200 (simultaneous streaming) and online platform
Session 1. Witch-hunts, Colonial Violence and Extractivism
Encounter
Tickets—Moderated by: Lucía de las Casas Florez and Sonia Ludd. Participants: Sashiprava Bindhani, Silvia Federici and The Campaign for the Memory of Women Persecuted for Witchcraft
Processes to accumulate capital in the Early Modern Period were traversed by witch-hunts in Europe, with the loss of land and common property for farmers, and the Americas, with forced indigenous servitude and African slave work. On both sides of the ocean, the accusations of witchcraft were used to censor, discipline and kill women who opposed land privatisation, the rupture of community relations and the control of reproduction and sexuality by ecclesiastical and civil powers. Today, these same accusations are used against women farmers who, from Latin America to India, defend their land and communities from present-day capitalist accumulation: extractivism.
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Saturday, 29 October 2022 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Session 2. Witch-hunt Narratives and Memory: the Salem Paradigm
Screening, Performance Action and Talk
TicketsHow was the figure of the witch constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Who was behind it, and what is its legacy today? What narratives are currently being constructed, what is the reason for them and what are the consequences? This session seeks to explore these and other issues from a case study: the Salem Witch Trials (USA, 1699), in which more than one hundred and fifty women were accused of witchcraft, nineteen of them executed.
11am A Witch Story
Presentation of the documentary film (in progress) directed by Yolanda Pividal and starring Silvia Federici and Alice Markham-Cantor12:30pm Vosotras, raíces
Performance-ritual by Grupo TIAMAT, directed by Esther Musgo (Esther Moñivas Mayor)
—Participants: Zoe Abán, Marisa Cortés, Esther Musgo (Esther Moñivas Mayor), Marta Pinilla, Beatriz Tejero and Amanda TüzVosotras, raíces (Women, Roots) is a song to inter-generational relations, the mutual care between women and the healing of historical wounds. In the old roots eradicated from the earth, felled and burnt, we encounter a tangible ancestral memory which is bursting with emotion and enables us to cross through pain, dignify it, and build from the solidarity of new presents.
1pm Conversation
—Moderated by: Lola Martínez Rojo. Participants: Silvia Federici, Alice Markham-Cantor, Esther Musgo (Esther Moñivas Mayor) and Yolanda Pividal
Second International Feminist Encounter on the Witch-hunt
Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence Against Women
Held on 28 Oct 2022
Led by the Church and certain sectors of civil society, the “witch-hunt” was a way to discipline women in Europe and the Americas from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. As evinced by Silvia Federici in her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), this process was a foundational element of modernity and capitalist society, denoting the break-up of communal relations that had hitherto existed and making women accept their new role as invisible workers in a new production system and as carers of labour.
Today, these mechanisms of submission linger in the criminalisation of ways of life that counter the advance of capitalism and colonialism, such as those upheld by women participating in anti-extractivist movements and defending territories in Latin America and India.
Three years on from its first edition, the Second International Feminist Encounter on the Witch-hunt. Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence Against Women continues by retrieving the memory of women accused of being witches and hounded and murdered in the Early Modern Period, and analysing mechanisms used for such purposes which persist today.
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Zoe Abán is a dancer who has trained, since 2018, in contemporary dance, dance-theatre and improvisation with Marian Villanueva Alcañiz. She is part of the youth section of the dance-theatre collective Colectivo CulGest.
Sashiprava Bindhani is a researcher and an activist against witch-hunts in Odisha (India). With a degree in Legislative Law-making, she has worked as the state director of the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) from Odisha and has participated in drafting the Law for the Prevention of Witch-hunting in this state since 2013. Her studies are based on witch-hunts in contexts of land conflicts, gender and health.
Marisa Cortés is a composer, poet and folk singer with a keen interest in pre-Columbian music from the Andes mountains. Trained in classical and modern music, she combines her art work with teaching. Her latest work, Mula-pájaro, combines her music and poetry to reflect upon the transformation of women over the past fifty years.
Lucía de las Casas Flórez holds a degree in Art History and an MA in Art Education (with a thesis on decolonial feminist art). She is an Italian-to-Spanish translator and a secondary school teacher. Since 2018, she has been part of Grupo de Madrid, which looks to retrieve the memory of women accused of witchcraft.
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American writer and a professor of Political Philosophy and Women’s Studies. She participated in founding the International Feminist Collective, an organisation that started the international campaign Wages For Housework (WFH) to advocate salaries for housework. For a number of years, she taught and lectured in Nigeria and is a professor emerita at Hofstra University in New York. Both trajectories come together in her two best-known works Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004) and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press, 2012).
Sonia Ludd holds a degree in Geography from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). She currently works as a History and Art History teacher in state schools in Spain. Since 2018, she has been part of Grupo de Madrid, which looks to retrieve the memory of women accused of witchcraft, and is also co-creator of the Factoría Luddita podcast for Ágora Sol Radio and Radio Almaina.
Alice Markham-Cantor is a writer, journalist and doula who is part of the Feminist Research on Violence collective in New York. In recent years, she has studied witch-hunts throughout history, giving lectures and participating in research projects on the economic context of these persecutions and their link to land appropriation.
Esther Musgo (Esther Moñivas Mayor) holds a PhD in Art History, and is a conservator-restorer of cultural heritage and an education professional in museums and cultural institutions. She is currently a lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has also developed research projects around contemporary art mediums and materials and has worked to develop education and cultural management projects in a number of Spanish institutions. Furthermore, she is an exhibition curator and founder of the Acción C cultural association and participates in different projects with performance and multimedia pieces, for instance A Witch Story (2022).
Marta Pinilla is a multidisciplinary artist and performer with studies in Art and Science. She has shown her work in countries such as China, Switzerland and Sweden, among others, and collaborated with different institutions like Wellcome Collection, Tate Modern, Lumen, MediaLab Matadero, Surge Madrid and La Juan Gallery.
Lola Martínez Rojo is a journalist and radio broadcaster. She started her career in Radio Exterior de España as assistant director of the programme Hora América, and in 2014 created the programme Artesfera, a sociocultural laboratory on Spain’s Radio 5. Five years later, she and her team received the Award for Journalism Against Gender Violence from the Grupo Norte Foundation for their radio adaptation of El quejío de una diosa (The Groan of a Goddess). In 2021, she became part of the project Amapolas, the aim of which is to grant women artists visibility in the rural environment. She currently combines her work as an editor of Artesfera with directing RadioActivas on Radio 5, a radio project which gives a voice to people and collectives transforming society by championing the commons and self-management.
Yolanda Pividal is an audiovisual narrator and cultural manager in Madrid and New York. Her documentaries, which spotlight the exploration of the impact of geopolitical frontiers on the lives of women and children, have received awards at different international film festivals. Moreover, her work has gained recognition from the International Documentary Association and the Arts Council in New York, among others. As a cultural manager, Pividal has set in motion innovative projects in institutions like the Jacob Burns Film Center and the Matadero’s Cineteca.
Beatriz Tejero holds a degree in History and Library Science and Documentation. She has carried out studies on Corporal Expression with Marta Schinca and Theatre in the Sala Cuarta Pared. Furthermore, she is a founding member of the cultural project La libre de Barrio, and combines her activity as a feminist and activist with her passion for performing arts.
Amanda Tüz is an art historian, musicologist, singer and poet who has carried out different studies in Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Laban Dance and Creative Dance. She has combined teaching and the coordination of the education project Lóva with music projects such as Magara and, currently, Alma de Tüz.
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Languages
Spanish and English with simultaneous interpreting. The activity also includes a Spanish Sign Language interpreter
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
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.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.