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September 5, 2016
Table 1. Networks, nodes and contact zones for a non-aligned geopolitical order
After the Bandung Conference in 1955, the Non-aligned Movement offered an alternative to the bipolar division of the world imposed by the two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. The attempt to search for another configuration of the world forged a union of peripheral nation states and inspired new cultural and artistic formations. Cold Atlantic will present transnational studies that grant visibility to collaboration networks initiated by artists, critics, curators and institutions, either in dialogue with the Non-Aligned Movement or inspired by it. The aim is to shed light on the internationalist culture that these alternative constellations helped consolidate, and the subversion of Cold War geographies that entailed such crossroads and entanglements.
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September 5, 2016
Table 2. Competing hegemonies
The collision between both superpowers brought a bilateral framework of aspirations and expectations to governments and opposing blocs that strived to be “modern”. A wide array of artistic practices and aesthetic discourses, often contradictory, stemmed from the negotiations between different notions of modernity, and circumstances and conditions in diverse local contexts. These states’ search for autonomy, sovereignty and progress was concurrent with the need for acknowledgement as members of a new geopolitical order. This session centres on a debate regarding the exchanges and confrontations that were entrenched in the struggle for cultural hegemony, under circumstances demarcated by the emergence of new geopolitical powers in the growing global context of the Cold War.
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September 6, 2016
Table 3. Resistance, dissidence and utopia(s)
In a world where imperialist and neo-colonial politics were imposed on both sides of the iron curtain, artistic practices provided ways to resists, subvert and combat them. This priority axis of Cold Atlantic aims to study vanguard and experimental artistic practices analyzing their aesthetic, political and social bases (and contexts), and their role as models for resistance against the normative culture(s) of the Cold War. Thus we seek to highlight the role of artistic production and cultural agents, operating in both, hegemonic and subaltern centers, as subversive tools in countercultural movements within the transatlantic axis, and to show their potential for imagining alternative forms of society.
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September 6, 2016
Table 4. Global order: Cold War and beyond
In 1967 the French philosopher Guy Debord interpreted the bipolar division of the world, Capitalism opposite Communism, as a global and interdependent system of total spectacle. Debord believed that complex geopolitical entanglements, and the repercussions in political, social and cultural spheres, hastened by the rapid development of media and economic networks, were evolving towards a unique totality which, by and large, has determined and given shape to the current global world. This session will analyse the dialogues and entanglements between artistic and cultural spheres during the Cold War and how they still endure in the present day. Therefore, it will look to analyse the impact of transatlantic configurations on the current global order, and on the transition of modernity to contemporaneity.
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September 7, 2016
Round table with the participants
Participants: Walter Mignolo, Andrea Giunta, Sarah Wilson and Jonathan Harris
Moderator: Serge Guilbaut
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Cold Atlantic
Cultural War, Dissident Artistic Practices, Networks and Contact Zones at the Time of the Iron Curtain
Held on 05, 06, 07 sep 2016
The international conference Cold Atlantic will examine the artistic, cultural and aesthetic exchanges produced between the USA, Europe, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. The aim is to highlight the axes of alignment and artistic exchange between the geopolitically minor actors that were trapped inside the huge theatrical strategy from this period. The conference, which will be conducted through round-table discussions, lectures and dialogue, organised through an open international process, looks to recover relatively unstudied nodes of cultural influence and dissemination in its aim to decentralise the Paris-New York axis that still dominates and is ubiquitous in studies on the Cold War and its artistic incarnations, thus fostering discussion that grants a voice to the forms of cultural expression that materialised outside official power structures.
These dialogues and interactions will be analysed within a Cold War context, whilst also proceeding from the destabilisation of the status quo brought about by the Bandung Conference (1955) and the Hungarian Revolution (1956). Consequently, it underscores the forms of mediation, dissent and resistance that sought to offer alternative answers to the ideological and aesthetic split that defined the cultural and social climate after World War Two. The conference will call into question canonical narratives of artistic modernity by exploring transatlantic artistic networks, with a view to eliciting the plurality of the responses to the ideological positioning this war held on a cultural level. Therefore, from this perspective Cold Atlantic will chart a new cartography of artistic practices and institutional relations, both subjective and political.
The re-evaluation of crossroads and friction in artistic production, material culture and political resistance will help to reconsider different accounts of modern art’s struggle, displaying alternatives to the prevailing Western vision, whilst also calling attention to the links that would bring dissident responses to life in the geopolitical order of the Cold War, a key period in the configuration of today’s global world. Spain’s own “peripheral” position with regard to the UK, France and the United States opens up a space that fosters a reconsideration of the role of modern art, questioning accounts based on the concept of progress that have predominated the study of artistic modernity.
Scientific Committee
Paula Barreiro López, Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, Chema González, Carlos Prieto del Campo, Olga Fernández López, Juan Albarrán, Julia Bailey, Andrea Giunta, Serge Guilbaut, Jonathan Harris and Jesús Carrillo
Within the framework of the research project
Decentralised Modernities: Art, Politics and Counterculture in the Transatlantic Axis during the Cold War (HAR2014-53834-P)
Associated activities
Predoctoral workshop at the University of Barcelona, 8 and 9 September 2016
Acknowledgements
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Saint Louis University, Universidad de Barcelona and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
In collaboration with
Organized by
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.