Archives of the Commons VI
For an Archive Imagination
Clemente Padín, Signografía I (Signography I), 1968; Signografía IX (Signography IX), 1969; Signografía VIII (Signography VIII), 1969, experimental poetry
Courtesy of the Clemente Padín Archive and the Red Conceptualismos del Sur
Archives of the Commons, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, is a bi-annual encounter which came into being in 2015 out of the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces of creation and care for memories. Its aim is to put forward opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as giving thought to experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, essential exercises of imagination and critique to articulate and construct narratives of memory in resistance.
This sixth edition explores the notion of archival imagination, understanding archive practices not only as the safe-keeping of past memory, but also as speculative projections and the creating of worlds. American historian and writer Saidiya Hartman puts forward critical fabulation as a writing practice from which to respond to voids and the systemic violence of colonial archives. This means negotiating and exceeding their limits, and reclaiming life stories to recount the present as a practice of freedom, that which “could have been a story told with and against archive”.
Furthermore, in their introductory text, Fernanda Carvajal, Moira Cristiá and Javiera Manzi, members of the Red Conceptualimos del Sur, allude to the Archives of the Commons III publication on archive imagination as an active willingness to reformulate modes of making archive. Upon interrupting or flowing beyond norms (modes of classification, description and automated practices), imagination works as an “inventiveness available to times of caring for archives and respect for the singularity of their forms, a practice which enables past experience to be recovered and reformulated to respond to the present, beyond mere documentary organisation”.
From a constellation of practices and experiences made possible by this notion, the seminar convenes a whole programme of conversations which address the production, maintenance and reconstruction of archives lost from or non-existent in imagination. The different guest archives share and reflect on the methodologies, institutional forms and artistic gestures that have unfolded to deal with erasure and destruction, as well as absence and emptiness. They are all horizons which raise questions around an archive-based creative power that challenges a hegemonic linearity of time and history and invents new forms of naming and organising in its making.
In parallel to the seminar is the launch of the international graphic art campaign Why the Question and Not the Statement Today? convened by pasafronteras, the Red Conceptualismos del Sur publisher. This campaign is understood as “a cross-border seedbed of questions to shake up the world, to activate archives, to open futures”, in the words of artist Graciela Carnevale. Contributions to the campaign will be shown during the days of the encounter.
Organising committee
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi, Sara Buraya Boned, Lucía Cañada, Marjolaine David, Maria Mallol González, Guille Mongan and Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Organised by
The activities of this programme
Participants
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi
is a graphic artist, archivist and teacher. After studying at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) and, with a study grant, at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she has been part of the group Cuatro//// Intervenciones Gráficas and the graphic cooperative La Voz de la Mujer, as well as developing the collective project Romero Archive for/to come and the Colectiva Editora Des-bordes. She is currently coordinator of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, where she articulates research, archives and editorial projects linked to political memory and artistic practices in Latin America.
Lucía Cañada
holds a PhD in Art History and Theory and is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Her research focuses on the link between artistic practices and education during the dictatorships in Latin America. Since 2025 she has been in charge of cataloguing the political graphic art collection from the Juan Carlos Romero Archive. She is also part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network node and develops the Romero Archive for/to come project.
Marjolaine David Briand
is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and Bordeaux Montaigne University. Her research focuses on artistic and political forms of occupying urban space developed by artistic, sexual-dissident and feminist activisms in Argentina from 2001 to 2021. She is part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network Archive node and the team of Red Constelaciones, an activism and research project which looks to create a digital archive tool of aesthetics and poetics in street interventions and struggles from Argentina.
Bertha Díaz
is a researcher, teacher and independent editor who currently lives in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Research in the Arts, Humanities and Education from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Díaz co-directs the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones and is a member of the research group ARTEA and the International Network of Latin American and European Theatre Researchers (RITTLE). She has worked with art platforms in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama, France, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, and, through live arts, her work experiments with ties between bodies, thought and writings, focusing on their sensorial, affective and political dimensions.
Awel Haouati
is a researcher in Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her work centres on press photography during the 1990s war in Algeria. In 2019 she founded the project Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie (Archives of Women’s Struggles in Algeria), which she manages jointly with Saadia Gacem, a fellow researcher in anthropology. She also works as an independent writer and photographer.
Marta María Hernangómez
holds a degree in Geography and History, an MA in Electronic Administration and Government, and is a civil servant in the Faculty Corps of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists. She collaborates with the project Aulas con Memoria (Classrooms with Memory), from the Association to Recover Historical Memory, and with the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation. Currently, she is the director of the Historical Archive of Social Movements, a state archive created in 2021, under Spain’s Ministry of Culture, with the sole remit of preserving documentary and bibliographic heritage generated and conserved by different organisations and social movements in contemporary Spain, making it available to the public.
Ana Longoni
is a writer, lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), curator and researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. She was director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department from 2018 to 2021. Moreover, she is one of the founders of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and develops the Romero Archive for/to come project. She holds a PhD in Argentinian art, specialising in the crossover of art and politics in Latin America from the 1960s to the present.
Ivette Quezada
is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research reflects on memory and the influence of artistic and creative practices in questioning notions of cultural heritage and the ways in which history in violent contexts is perceived and represented. Since 2022, she has worked in collaboration with the Casa de la Mujer de Huamachuco, linked to arpilleras and their creation, circulation and archiving.
Maria Mallol
works in the Tentacular Museum Department of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Directorship.
Guille Mongan
is an art historian, independent researcher, curator, teacher and artist. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts History from the Arts Faculty at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata (UNLP), in La Plata, Argentina, and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from MNCARS/UAM Madrid, and at present she is a PhD candidate in History at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales (IDAES) from the Universidad de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. She is a member of the artistic activism collective Serigrafistas Queer and the Southern Conceptualisms Network platform for research, debate and collective positions, where she currently works as a coordinator.
Mario Rodríguez Dávila
is a film-maker, cultural manager, artistic researcher and co-director of the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones. His filmography has been shown in France, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, England, Colombia and Ecuador, while his works move between archive and documentary fiction, as well as the search for memory and individual and collective poetic-political history, with not only people at the centre but also exterior and interior landscapes and geographies. He is currently studying an MA in Communication Sciences at Universidad Nova de Lisboa, specialising in Film and Television, while he works on his film projects.
Tania Romero Barrios
is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, specialising in Gender Studies, at the University of Paris 8, and holds a degree in Quechua Language and Literature from INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales). She is a member of the LER (Laboratoire d’Études Romanes) labs and CERLOM (Centre d’Ètude et de Recherche sur les Littératures et les Oralités du Monde), and coordinates the multilingual museographic project Warmikuna - voces, rostros y memorias. Her research focuses on Peruvian literature in Spanish and Quechua, memory, political violence and Latin American feminisms.
Ana Kutleša
is an art historian, researcher and curator. She is a member of the curatorial collective [BLOK], founded in Zagreb in 2001, which aims to democratise art and culture, articulating resistance against privatisation attempts. In 2018 she started The Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum project, working jointly with the community from the Trešnjevka neighbourhood to build a virtual collection of artistic, cultural and political productions to vindicate the memory of people living in the area, a working-class neighbourhood whose history has been omitted from national archives and institutions.
Laura Pelayo
is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. With a PhD in Art History and Theory from the Autonomous University of Madrid, her professional career as a researcher in contemporary art goes hand in hand with her growing interest in the possibilities that libraries and archives offer culture and the development of contemporary artistic practices. Since 2019 she has worked in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre, focusing on archives, dissemination and driving forward research activity.
More activities
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.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
Take Shelter in Culture 2026
Mondays, from 6 July to 24 August 2026 – 3pm
This summer, the Museo Reina Sofía participates, for the third year running, in Take Shelter in Culture. The campaign features performances by distinguished figures from flamenco guitar and dance in the rooms of The Spanish Night. Flamenco, Avant-Garde and Popular Culture, to the backdrop of Alberto’s work La romería de los cornudos (The Pilgrimage of the Cuckolds), on the second floor of the Sabatini Building, close to Picasso’s Guernica.
Every Monday, starting on Monday, 6 July and ending on 24 August, at 3pm different flamenco artists will perform, offering a different way of visiting the works in the Museo Reina Sofía Collections.
This programme of cultural activities, promoted from Madrid City Council’s Area of Culture, Tourism and Sport, allows people visiting the Museo in the hottest hours of the day during the summer months to enjoy a space in which to shelter from extreme temperatures.
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.
