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Thursday, 24 January
Session 1
Radical Citizen and Aesthetic Politics
An introduction to the Spanish Transition as a critical device. The myth and its different counternarratives. The conceptual aporias of the 1970s: citizen/State, history/memory, aesthetics/history, politics/culture, counterculture/official culture. Five transitional models: heroic, melancholic, civic-popular, memorial and necropolitical. Networks of counterculture and the civic-popular paradigm: relationships between social movements and cultural actionism in the 1970s. Citizen forms and ephemeral aesthetics. Documentary devices and memory.
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Friday, 25 January
Session 2
Poetics of Democracy
This session is structured around a conversation between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Rosario Peiró, Lola Hinojosa and Carla Giachell.
Architecture from the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition. The Venice Pavilion of 1976 and mutations from the Anti-Franco cultural field. Curatorial archaeology and exhibition machines. Street documents: artistic forms of social movements. The new transitional left and its historical subjects: feminisms, neighbourhood associations, neighbourhood culture and the libertarian movement. Counterculture and its spaces: festivals, hangouts and magazines. A transitional subject: dangers to society, psychiatric patients and gender dissidents. Vampire imagery from the Transition. Figures and forms of constitutional culture.
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Monday, 28 January
Session 3
The Sides of Shadows. Critical Aesthetics from the 1970s
This session is structed around a conversation with Anxo Rabuñal, curator of O lado da sombra: sedición gráfica e iniciativas raras ou desacreditadas entre 1971 e 1989 (A Coruña, Seoane Foundation, 2005).
A curatorial history of Iberian countercultures (i). The Sides of Shadows: the story of a Galicia-based exhibition project. Alternative genealogies: centre-periphery dynamics in the transitional archive. Seville, Galicia, Barcelona and the Basque Country: centrifugal and centripetal logics of 1970s countercultures. Artistic and exhibition devices from counterculture in Galicia, between the popular and the avant-garde: publishing, poetry, music and performing arts. Félix Guattari and Allen Ginsberg in Santiago: the history of Conxo and the impossible archive of transitional anti-psychology. Iberian-Galician machines for living: the curatorial circulation of Llorenç Soler, Anna Turbau and César Portela.
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Wednesday, 30 January
Session 4
Prohibited Archives. The Impossible Imaginary of the Democracy
Memory and form in post-Francoism: the formal construction of hegemonic accounts of the Transition and capturing civil imaginaries from the 1970s. Co-opting, erasing, displacing and resemantization: formal mechanisms of the foundational discourse of democracy. The privatisation and nationalisation of collective heritage. A curatorial history of Iberian countercultures (ii). Lines of shadow: underground continuities, interposed inheritances and civil re-appropriations of 1970s forms. Ephemeral Transition archives today: online archivists, citizen memories and network culture in the crisis of the 1978 regime. Other transitions: remakes and revivals.
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Thursday, 31 January
Session 5
Oral Memories and the Democracy to Come
This session constitutes a survey of urban space in the Transition, in the form of a critical-memorial wander around Madrid’s Malasaña neighbourhood with a testimony mediation.
The Transition and its (non)places of memory. Institutional memory and underground memories of the (post)transitional city. The visible and invisible marks of counterculture in public space. The Movida Movement and the city-Movida: an urban account of the spatial metamorphoses from the Maravillas neighbourhood to present-day Malasaña. From neighbourhood struggles to fights against gentrification: political mutations of space in the shift towards immaterial capitalism. Plaza Dos de Mayo and its civic and national monumentalities. Archaeologies of the glance and the poetics of testimony: accounts and figures of 2 May 1977. The history and memory of a transitional icon: the photography of Félix Lorrio.
A Change of Aesthetics: Citizen Ruptures in the Spanish Transition
A course conducted by Germán Labrador
Held on 24, 31 ene 2019
This course, with its design rooted in the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition, explores the imaginary of 1970s Spain from a central hypothesis: the articulation, in the confrontation with Francoism and post-Francoism, of citizens’ breakaway resulting from an upsurge in certain aesthetic practices. Through these practices, new political subjects were shaped in opposition to the regime’s institutions and forms of discipline. This other society included women, young people, neighbourhood groups and “dangers to society”, the last of which refer to the Francoist Law that stigmatised those considered a menace to the regime, from beggars to homosexuals. In parallel, the emergence of this multifarious civil society and its struggles for emancipation questions the limits of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy, its practices producing and organising alternative forms of culture and social and urban models, in addition to ways of life referred to here inside this framework as ‘transitional’. The documents of such actions and proposals constitute a democratic archive, susceptible to questioning, in exhibition terms, and intervened in from the present. Thus, to think about the transitional legacy means to reflect upon the origins, devices and limits of democracy, and imagine its possible transformations.
Across five sessions and in conversation with other voices, Germán Labrador Méndez, a professor and researcher of Cultural Studies at Princeton University, sets forth a critical survey of the accounts of democracy founded through the tension between archive and myth, challenging predominant expectations surrounding the period through diverse analytical strategies. Oral memory and documents from other transitions which occurred at the time (neighbourhood, youth, autonomous, psychiatric, gender…) speak of unrepresented historical experiences in the official foundational discourse of post-Francoism and the utopian potential they possess with respect to an alternative citizen genealogy.
Consequently, drawing on the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition as a critical and methodological tool, this course explores aesthetic mechanisms from 1970s Spain to focus on their transformative potential. Approaching the crossroads between culture and politics in the framework of a democracy still to come, discussions will revolve around notions of public space, the urban experience, aesthetic ruptures, the subversion of daily life, bio-literature, civil imagination, generational destruction and ephemeral memory. Moreover, the issue of transient cultural forms – minor and often anonymous – will thread together the different sessions, each analysing the way in which a time of civil conversation, the occupation of public space, the affirmation of subaltern political subjects or aesthetic disputes involve the questioning of democracy.
The sessions will take place both in the Museo, in a lecture room and in different exhibition rooms, and in Madrid’s Malasaña neighbourhood, in wanderings around and explorations of the city. Upon the conclusion of the course, on Friday 1 February, the Museo will go on to hold the conference Abductions of the Imagination. A Conference on Post-Francoism Counterculture, a public activity centred on examining Spanish counterculture during the Transition.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Course director
Germán Labrador Méndez is head professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Princeton University. His research in the field of cultural history specialises in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, citizenship and memory in a contemporary Iberian context. He is the author of Letras arrebatadas. Poesía y química en la transición española (Devenir, 2009) and Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968-1986) (Akal, 2017), and is currently writing a paper on the political and cultural responses to the 2008 crisis and working on an anthology of underground poetry. He is also one of the curators of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition.
Participants
Carla Giachello is an intern in the Museo Reina Sofía Collections Department and assistant curator of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition.
Lola Hinojosa is a curator of Performing Arts and Intermedia at the Museo Reina Sofía and co-curator of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition.
Rosario Peiró is head of the Museo Reina Sofía Collections Department and co-curator of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition.
Anxo Rabuñal is a curator and researcher. He is the curator of O lado da sombra: sedición gráfica e iniciativas ignoradas, raras ou desacreditadas entre 1971 e 1989 (Luis Seoane Foundation, 2005), a show which seeks to trace popular culture in the non-institutional scene in Galicia at the end of Francoism and during the Transition.
![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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
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.
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.