Studium Generale. The Deep-rooted Word
With Marilyn Boror and María Sánchez
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
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
Organised
Participants
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”.
Programme
6:30pm Welcome and presentation
6:45pm TEN STEPS TOWARDS DEATH. “Names as Evidence of the Colonial Wound”
— Action carried out by Marilyn Boror
7:15pm Good Shade
— Reading by María Sánchez
7:45pm Marilyn Boror and María Sánchez in Conversation
— Accompanied by María Íñigo Clavo and Ana Vidal González
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.