Studium Generale. The Deep-rooted Word

With Marilyn Boror and María Sánchez

Photograph of a bouquet of flowers next to a gravestone with an inscription announcing the name change from Marilyn Elany Boror Bor to Marilyn Elany Castillo Novella, dated in Guatemala on 23 August 2018 — Marilyn Boror, *Edicto Cambio de nombre* (Change of Name Edict), 2018. Courtesy of the artist

Held on 13 Jun 2025

Studium Generale is an annual encounter between the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Museo Reina Sofía, and falls within the framework of their collaboration on the Bachelor’s Degree in Art. The name of the encounter refers to the term for a compendium of schools in the Middle Ages: a kind of open proto-university assembling teachers, students and the teaching of different disciplines and from different geographical origins. The encounter combines different points of co-existence between the academic community and the Museo’s teams in a public programme orbiting around contemporary debates which fuel artistic practice and research.

This edition, with the title The Deep-rooted Word, probes situated practices of art-making, community imagination and political agency, thereby seeking to analyse our relationship with land and territory via the links between word, up/rooting and dis/memory.

In recent years, there has been an increasingly clear alignment between criticism of the exploitation of the earth and women’s role as the load-bearers of life. It is no coincidence that, since 2009, with a lack of government action, it was a collective of Indigenous women who took it upon themselves to clean industrial waste from Lake Atitlán (Guatemala). This movement is just one example of many that have shown women’s leadership to protect the environment in Latin America.

Despite women also taking up the first line of defence in protecting the earth and non-human lives in Spain, the majority feminist political model remains “urban”, with urbanity understood as the spatial decline of the modern mentality. Thus, we have come to neglect caring for knowledge, memories, words and seeds which inhabit the bodies of those who engage with territory and earth with their hands.

To delve further into these issues, the encounter pivots on the work of Marilyn Boror, an artist and curator from Guatemala, and María Sánchez, a poet and field veterinarian who lives in Galicia. Rooted in their respective contexts, the practice of both artists shows art’s potential to combine different knowledge with the aim of re-reading territories and their tensions, restoring a complex vision which is distanced from the bucolic and the catastrophic.

The activity is made up of an initial presentation and the activation of each guest’s artistic expression, followed by a space of dialogue and conversation.

Curators

Laia Blasco Soplon (UOC), Anna Busquets (UOC), Elena Corrales Pérez (Museo Reina Sofía), Muriel Gómez Pradas (UOC), María Íñigo Clavo (UOC), Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga (Museo Reina Sofía), Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín (UOC), Ana Beatriz Vidal González (Museo Reina Sofía)

Programme

Studium Generale

Inside the framework of

Bachelor’s Degree in Art

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Organised

Participants

Boror, Marilyn

is a Maya Kaqchikel artist, independent curator, art lecturer, and Guatemalan cultural manager, recognized for her extensive material experimentation and deeply rooted social practice. Her work engages with themes of Indigenous identity, historical memory, colonialism, and resistance, establishing a dialogue between tradition and contemporary structures of art. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and has undertaken artist residencies at institutions such as Fundación Ama Amoedo (Uruguay, 2023), ARTE-UNAM (Mexico, 2022), Galería Muy (Mexico, 2019), and EspIRA/ESPORA (Nicaragua, 2013–2016). She has also delivered lectures and talks at internationally renowned academic and museum spaces, including Cornell University, Stamps Gallery, the Institute for Contemporary Art (United States), and Museo Amparo (Mexico, 2024). Her work is part of international collections such as those of the Museo Reina Sofía (Spain), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Panama), the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende (Chile), and Art Nexus (Colombia).

María Sánchez

is a veterinarian and writer. She works to advocate other forms of production and other ways of relating to the earth, for instance agro-ecology, grazing and extensive farming. She coordinates the project Las entrañas del texto (The Entrails of Text), prompting a reflection on the creative process, and Almáciga (Seedling), an open and collective seedbed of words from our rural areas, from the different languages in our territory. Fuego la sed (La Bella Varsovia, 2024) is her most recent published work, a poetry collection which is “militantly lyrical” and about “human decisions which impact the course of a stream or the flight of a bird”.