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Anthony Vidler. Towards Superarchitettura
In collaboration with Aldo van Eyck and later with lyricists and situationists, Constant worked for a number years imagining architecture and urbanism that would respond to the physical and functional needs of the environment, based on the gypsy camps and migrant communities in post-industrial society. New Babylon remains an intense humanist experiment between a broad group of visionary projects by artists and architects involved in the revolt against alienating and monotonous environments in post-war reconstruction. Some these projects were utopian, for instance Nicolas Schöffer’s Cybernetic City, Mobile Architecture by Yona Friedman, the Mobile City by Iannis Xenakis and Archigram’s Plug-in City; while others were dystopian, such as Archizoom’s No-Stop City, or the Continuous Monument by Superstudio. Some, however, were part of the call by critic Reyner Banham to “invent ‘other’ architecture”. Today we can see the impact of these visions on divergent architects like Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and Leon Krier, yet no contemporary architect has opened up a space quite like Constant’s.
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José Miguel de Prada Poole, José Pérez de Lama, Izaskun Chinchilla and Ethel Baraona. Another City for Another Life
New Babylon responded to the pressing need to find urgent answers to mass and global urban growth, in addition to tackling the logic of alignment and privatisation in the contemporary city. This round-table discussion, which takes its title from a text by Constant, brings together four architects that have addressed these challenges in different ways: José Miguel de Prada Poole, through the city that instantly took shape in the ephemeral mega-structures of leisure in the 1968 environment; José Pérez de Lama, with the overflow of architecture into the convergence of digital technology, new social movements and urban territory; and Izaskun Chinchilla’s concept of organic prototypes and mechanisms conceived through play and participation. The table will be moderated by editor and critic Ethel Baraona.
![Constant. New Babylon Nord [Nueva Babilonia norte], (detalle). Plano, 1958 © Constant, VEGAP, Madrid, 2016](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/babylon.jpg.webp)
Held on 17 Feb 2016
New Babylon (1956–1974) is a networked city project conceived by the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys for the “total fulfilment of life”, an approach to urbanism based on the freedom of the individual through the power of play and creativity. This activity, which marks the end of the retrospective in the Museo devoted to Constant, examines this total artwork’s place in the utopian urbanism that followed World War Two through a lecture by Anthony Vidler and a round-table discussion featuring participation from José Miguel de Prada Poole, Izaskun Chinchilla, José Pérez de Lama and Ethel Baraona.
In the lapse of almost half a century since this last great utopia of European art – outlined by Constant in maquettes, photomontages, planimeters and films - numerous questions still arise, and aim to be addressed in this activity: Where is Constant’s place in the post-war urbanism related to contemporary proposals such as those from the Independent Group, Yona Friedman and Le Corbusier, among others? What is the flipside today, and how can it keep up its ability to break ground in an age when technological networks are paradoxically inseparable from the more sophisticated forms of control and nomadism is associated with uncertainty as a class condition?
In collaboration with
The Netherlands Embassy, COAM and Fundación COAM
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Participants
Ethel Baraona. Editor, critic and curator. Together with César Reyes, she is the co-founder of dpr-barcelona, a research studio and independent publishers, and editor of Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme.
Izaskun Chinchilla. Architect. Since 2001 she has directed her own studio, Izaskun Chinchilla Arquitectos, and her work has received awards at various international conferences and competitions. In 2014 she won the competition City of Dreams for her pavilion design in Governors Island (New York), which used recycled material and was built collectively. She is also a professor and researcher at Bartlett School (University College London).
José Pérez de Lama. Architect and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture at the University of Seville. Between 2001 and 2011 he was part of the group hackitectura.net (together with Sergio Moreno and Pablo de Soto). He has published and edited Devenires ciborg. Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Redes de Comunicación (2006), WikiPlaza. Request For Comments (2011) and Yes We Are Open! Fabricación digital, tecnologías y cultura libres (2014).
José Miguel de Prada Poole. Architect and professor of Architectural Design, Industrial Design for Housing and Emergency Architecture at ETSAM (the Polytechnic University of Madrid). In 1975 he won the National Architecture award, and was also a researcher at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and visiting professor at the MIT in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) between 1980 and 1982. In 1968 he devised the Ciudad instantánea (Instant City) in Ibiza and in 1972 the space for the Pamplona Encounters.
Anthony Vidler. Architectural historian and theorist. He is dean and professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture (2002–2012), and visiting professor at Yale and Princeton Universities, among numerous others. His publications include Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (2011), Architecture between Spectacle and Use (2008), Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992) and The Writing of the Walls. Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987).
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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.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.