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July 11, 2013
Table 1: Encounters between Spain and Latin America
Moderated by: Jesús Carrillo
10:00 a.m.
Presentation
Paula Barreiro López, Jesús Carrillo, Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez and Gabriel Pérez Barreiro
10:30 – 11:10 a.m.
Keynote address
Olga Fernández López. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Notas sobre un relato migrante: vanguardias artísticas entre Latinoamérica y España
11:10 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Communications
Eamon McCarthy. Queens University, Belfast
Norah Borges: el arte de la negociación
Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales. Universidad de Granada
La vanguardia oculta. Trayectos del diseño gráfico rioplatense (1920-1935)
12:00 – 12:30 p.m.
Break
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Communications
Irene Herner. Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City
Siqueiros contra el fascismo y la guerra (1932-1939)
Joan Robledo-Palop. Yale University, New Haven
Frente a Frente y Nueva Cultura: narraciones transatlánticas de la violencia y el fascismo
Idoia Murga Castro. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Encuentros en escena: danza mexicana y exilio republicano
Miguel Cabañas Bravo. History Institute CCHS-CSIC, Madrid
Legados y esperanzas en los creadores españoles del exilio de 1939 en Cuba
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Lunch Break
3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Communications
Ana María León. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Antonio Bonet: el último indiano
Aitor Acilu and Juan Biain. Universidad de Navarra and Arantzazu Gaur Foundation
Jorge Oteiza. De San Agustín a Santiago. Miradas al origen: el pasado como amigo
Jennifer Josten. University of Pittsburgh
La migración de formas entre España y México: Mathias Goeritz y la difusión del arte abstracto en la posguerra
Imelda Ramírez. Universidad EAFIT, Medellín
Relatos de la escultura moderna en Colombia: Jorge Oteiza y Edgar Negret
5:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Break
5:30 – 6:40 p.m.
Communications
Ernesto Hernández Busto. Independent researcher
El sueño y la piedra: notas sobre João Cabral de Melo, Joan Miró, “Dau al Set” y la estética de la composición
María González Pendás. Columbia University, New York
Intercontinentes: ilusiones del exilio republicano en México a través de unas formas de hormigón
Fernando Herrero Matoses. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alberto Greco y Julio Cortázar: el 'juego' y la trayectoria nómada de la vanguardia
6:40 – 8:00 p.m.
Responses to the communications and colloquium
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July 12, 2013
Table 2: Modernity and Modernism(s): Displacement and Divergence
Moderated by: Paula Barreiro López.
9:00 – 9:40 a.m.
Keynote address
Michael Asbury. Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), University of the Arts, London
Contesting Notions of Hybridity in Brazilian Modern Art
9:40 – 11:10 a.m.
Communications
Lori Cole. Brandeis University, Waltham
¿Qué es la vanguardia? Ultraism Between Madrid and Buenos Aires
Mara Sánchez Llorens. Universidad Nebrija, Madrid
Cuando los límites del arte son invisibles. Cartografías universitarias latinoamericana
Kaira Cabañas. PhD. Princeton University
Modern and Mad: Ethics of Reception, Rio de Janeiro
Catrin Seefranz. University of the Arts, Zurich
Modernismo Pobre. The Emancipatory Practices of the “Avant-Garde in Bahia” in the 1950s
11:10 – 11:30 a.m.
Break
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Communications
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez. Saint Louis University, Madrid
The Paradoxes of Modernism, and the Divided Legacies of Surrealism and Abstraction in Mexico
Cecilia Fajardo Hill. Independent art historian and curator, Los Angeles
Las ‘otras’ modernidades
María Iñigo Clavo. Spanish University of Distance Education and Universidade de São Paulo
Las preposiciones de la modernidad
Edith Wolfe. Tulane University, New Orleans
Latin America’s Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms and the Limits of Center and Periphery Models for understanding the Avant-Garde
1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Responses to the communications and colloquium
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Lunch Break
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July 12, 2013
Table 3: Museography, representation and curatorial narratives
Moderated by: María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco.
3:30 – 4:10 p.m.
Keynote address
Gabriel Pérez Barreiro. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection Foundation
Algunos apuntes sobre exposiciones de arte 'latinoamericano': constelaciones, estrellas, temas y variaciones
4:10 – 5:40 p.m.
Communications
Dafne Cruz Porchini. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City
La Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo en México (1940). Símbolo de un cambio de paradigmas
Aleca Le Blanc. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Under Construction: Calder at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Art Moderna in 1959
Carmen Juliá. Tate, London
Julio Plaza y el arte postal: redes de intercambio transnacional
Gina Tarver. Texas State University, San Marcos
Espacios ambientales en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá: fomentando una neo-vanguardia internacional en Colombia
5:40 – 6:10 p.m.
Break
6:10 – 7:40 p.m.
Communications
Miriam Basilio. New York University
El canon latinamericano en desarrollo: exponiendo la colección en el Museo de Arte Moderno, 1945-1954
Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
La abstracción geométrica cubana: intercambios artísticos internacionales y políticas museológicas locales
Lucas Baden. Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG), Karlsruhe
'Vochito' contra 'Murales'- de 'Motor' a 'Promotor': Fernando Gamboa, la vanguardia del arte méxicano y la Bienal de Venecia
Francisco Godoy Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
El modelo constelar: Mari Carmen Ramírez y su estela
7:40 – 8:00 p.m.
Break
8:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Responses to the communications and colloquium -
July 13, 2013
Table 4: Genealogies and Discourses of the Avant-garde
Moderated by: Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez.
10:30 – 11:10 a.m.
Keynote address
Andrea Giunta. University of Texas, Austin
Transatlánticos / Transcontinentales. Una discusión sobre diálogos y genealogías
11:10 – 12:20 p.m.
Communications
Harper Montgomery. Hunter College, New York
The Critic and the Visionary Avant-garde, a Transnational Network
Manuel Gutiérrez Silva. Rice University, Houston
Vision and Distinction: Avant-garde Artwriting and the Deconstruction of Visual Culture in Post-revolutionary Mexico
Cecilia Braschi. University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne
La ‘síntesis de las artes’ en las revistas brasileñas de posguerra: herencias vanguardistas y postulados locales
12:20 – 12:40 p.m.
Break
12:40 – 2:00 p.m.
Communications
Daniela Lucena. Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET
Tensiones entre arte/política en la asociación arte concreto-invención
Paula Barreiro López. History Institute CCHS-CSIC, Madrid
Hacia la izquierda: el acomodo de una vanguardia “sans rivages” en el discurso estético marxista de los años sesenta
Jaime Vindel. Universidad de León
Conciencia ética y conciencia estética en la vanguardia argentina de los años sesenta. Una crítica del esteticismo de la teoría de la vanguardia posmarxista
2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Lunch Break
4:00 – 5:10 p.m.
Communications
Mariola V. Alvarez. Rice University, Houston
Neoconcrete Books and the Politics of Participation
Ornela S. Barisone. Universidad Nacional de Rosario, National Board of Scientific and Technical Research, Institute of Latin American Literature, Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos
Discursos de la vanguardia e intercambios transnacionales ‘fuera de foco’: sobre el invencionismo y la propuesta integrativa de E. A. Vigo
Fernanda Nogueira. Universidade de São Paulo
La vanguardia más allá de la vanguardia. El caso del Poema/Processo en Brasil
5:10 – 5:30 p.m.
Break
5:30 p.m. – 6:40 p.m.
Communications
José Luis de la Nuez Universidad Carlos III, Madrid
La difusión de las neovanguardias en América Latina y su repercusión en la crítica
Eve Kalyva. Universidad de Buenos Aires
Unas reflexiones sobre la vanguardia después el arte conceptualMara Polgovsky Ezcurra. University of Cambridge
Materia política: Marcos Kurtycz, León Ferrari y el retorno de lo (sur)real
6:40 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Responses to the communications and colloquium
8:00 – 8:15 p.m.
Closing act
Transatlantic Encounters: Avant-garde Discourses in Spain and Latin America

Held on 11, 12, 13 Jul 2013
This international event, which brings together researchers, artists and curators from both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to stimulate reflection about the notion of avant-garde in relation to the experience and discourse of modernity between 1920 and 1970.
The main object of this reflection is the political and aesthetic avant-garde that formed in the context of the first and second Avant-gardes (or Neo-avantgardes), and also the role that the exchanges between Spain and Latin America played in the construction of this notion. Through keynote addresses and communications, the various sessions will present the latest research, thus contributing to a better understanding of the relationships and exchanges between Spain and Latin America (which have been little studied to date), and to a reconsideration of historiography and the dominant discourses of modernism and modernity.
Organised by
CSIC History Institute (1), Saint Louis University Madrid, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and Museo Reina Sofía
(1) Supported by the National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation Project After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art since 1931




Participants
Scientific committee
Paula Barreiro López. History Institute at the Human and Social Sciences Centre, CSIC (Spanish National Research Council)
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez. Saint Louis University, Madrid
Jesús María Carrillo Castillo. Museo Reina Sofía
Gabriel Pérez Barreiro. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection Foundation
Más actividades
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.

Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
27, 28, 29 ABR 2026
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?

Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.

Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.

