TIZ 4. Slumil K’ajxemk’op (Rebel Land)

In 1992, Spain’s institutions wanted to be modern but without shaking off the imperial past they commemorated. To fund the Barcelona Olympics and Expo ’92 in Seville, the country incurred a debt of 180 million euros with European banks, foreshadowing States’ loss of autonomy to the financial sector. Around this time, the experimental duo Los Voluble put forward an audiovisual and sound exploration which reflected on 1992 and its implications in Spain’s cultural, social and political sphere, drawing from archive material, electronic music and live cinema.

Curator: José Luis Espejo and Jesús Jara
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

The Neighbourhood Picnic is the chance for Lavapiés (Madrid) residents to come together in the Museo’s Garden, a place for everyone and part of the daily life of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. This year, the struggles and protests of different collectives that make up the Museo Situado network are the focus, and the aim is to grant visibility to three campaigns: #Esenciales* #RegularizacionYa (#Essential* #RegularisationNow), #Ratificacion189Ya (#Ratification189Now) and #StopExclusionSanitaria (#StopHealthExclusion).

Organised by: Museo Situado

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forced migration of millions of people has once again become a pressing issue that reignites the debate around human trafficking — one of the 21st century’s recurring forms of slavery — and the situations that cause it. This edition of Situated Voices turns its attentions to the urgent need to create public policies that detect, support and protect people being trafficked, suggesting the need to place this vulnerability above any immigration laws and other types of legislation.  

Organised by: GRIGRI, Museo Situado and Red Solidaria de Acogida

Starting from the image of the ship Ever Given stranded on the Suez Canal in 2021, the sixth edition of Archipelago reflected on the material questions that influence music, for instance the transportation of raw materials and goods and the importance of ports, colonial routes and ocean currents, in addition to forced migrations. Through a string of concerts fusing traditional music and experimentation, Archipelago recapitulated, reinterpreted and overhauled learning related to the common history of traditional music to date.

Participants: Erkizia + Cantizano, Edna Martinez, Pujllay Masis, Mazaher and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi.

Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This edition activates Room 104.06. Luis Camnitzer: Puerto Montt Massacre, 1969 and Room 104.07. A Map Is Not a Place. Via Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, active since 1971 in Peru, fragments of the collective’s artistic repertoire are set in relation to the memories formalised by other artists who have confronted similar political or social situations.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

The Expanded Theatricalities Chair analyses the thought inhabiting stage and performance practice. This second edition presents the artistic and political pathway taken by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. The programme gets under way with a performance action by Yuyachkani in the rooms of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, framed inside the programme Free Unions, and continues with sessions focused on the archive of the group’s output across fifty years and on their work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Moreover, one of the sessions converses with the Aníbal Quijano Chair.

Curator: ARTEA
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

The Aníbal Quijano Chair opens a channel of collective reflection-action, incorporating it into the multiple viewpoints that today find colonial modernity stripped of its primeval promises. This 2022 edition centres on examining the patriarchal epistome that becomes present in inquisitorial feminism and debates around transfeminisms. The programme starts with a seminar in which Rita Segato participates alongside local transfeminist activists, continues with a conversation between Teresa Ralli, a founder and member of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, and Rita Segato to set up a dialogue with the Expanded Theatricalities Chair, and ends with a public lecture by Segato.

Curators: Elisa Fuenzalida and Rita Segato
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

What desires did tourist cities have to arouse in their permanent or temporary residents? What were the architecture of pleasure promises and what pain did they open the way for? What dystopias have we inherited from the tourist utopias of the 1970s? These are the questions anchoring a session run by the research group TURICOM. The edition starts with four lectures by Eugenia Afinoguénova, Cristina Arribas, Julián Díaz Sánchez and Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero, before moving on to a conversation between Antoni Miralda and Jordi Costa, and ending with a final debate moderated by Germán Labrador Méndez, director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and the inter-university research group TURICOM. The Tourist Experience: Image, Body and Death

The Chair of Situated Thought seeks to propel spaces of dialogue and transmission and bring together intellectual practices on different fronts that have been emerging in Latin America. The programme places the situation extending across Chile since 2019 in dialogue, and confrontation, with other Latin American contexts, focusing on the tension between social control and revolts or social flare-ups inside the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also looks to grant visibility to present-day tensions and contradictions in the constituent exercise of political imagination that joins critical thought, activisms and artistic practices. 

Curators: Ileana Diéguez and Ana Longoni
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Campus Cuajimalpa, Mexico) 
Collaboration: Universidad de Chile, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Chile) and Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos (Chile)

The issue of exile cannot be separated from the history of relations between Spain and Latin America, from the spectres of colony and empire. Yet exiles also enable other relationships between Spanishness and Latin Americaness to be imagined. The pieces in this room demonstrate how, for many exiles, diaspora represents a chance to question the national, historical and racial categories upon which the discourse of Hispanic identity and its origins were based. It explores a “tertiary identity”, if we return to the theory of “three Spains” with which Américo Castro revolutionised Spanish historiography. In it, when the exiled subject did not dream of being a conquistador or give themselves over to anomie, solidarity and empathy towards the earth’s condemned can be rediscovered due to their condition of being subordinate and dispossessed. Many Spanish Republicans learned to see themselves as stateless upon documenting the exclusion of Blackness and Indigenousness practiced in their societies of integration, or projected their own experience on the forms of syncretism and the resistance of these communities.

Spain’s colonies were already scarce in the years of major European decolonisation, yet Francoism had turned the glorification of Hispanic imperial feats into one of the basic cornerstones of its rhetorical pomp. Therefore, the official propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s hammered home the representation of scenes underscoring the need to act as guardians of the colonised population, backed by “scientific” research conducted by the Institute of African Studies (IDEA), from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), into “the mental capacity of the black man”. Even so, the pieces in this room show how the greatest defence of a colonial world view could be carried out in a more grid-like and vague way in the fabric of daily life and the emerging consumer society: in advertising “foreign” products, in books, comics and collections of adventure stickers, and even the development of the slave monkey illustrating the first tins of Cola Cao.

Expo ’92 in Seville, an event conceived to celebrate Spain’s definitive entry into modernity, revealed more sharply the light and darkness of the Iberian colonial legacy. Drawing from this event, Rooms 002.01 to 002.22 question the intrinsic relationship between conquest and violence, and contain spaces and themes which chime with the concept of “rebel land” articulating this fourth TIZ, for instance: the critical reinterpretation of the fifth centenary offered by Room 002.06; the question around modern-day Potosí cities in Room 002.08; the memory of the consequences of the 1884 Berlin Conference in Room 002.09; and the question concerning a “potential history” in relation to the colonial cultural pillaging offered by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s film Un-documented. Undoing Imperial Plunder in Room 002.18

An exhibition devoted to the work of Alejandra Riera which assays the poetic modes of making place through a recurring image in her practice: a collective canvas, which for this occasion takes the form of a garden in movement. Beyond a retrospective, the exhibition seeks to experiment with the “how” of poetically renewing via a unique and shared experience, gestures and questionings which emerge from the archives of “lieuxdétudes” (places of studies) started by the artist almost three decades ago and unfurled here. The result of individual effort and long-term commitment, these Lieuxdétudes build and sustain affective and sensitive settings, spaces for interrogation and collective breathing.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall is the outcome of a long collective research process conducted by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía. The exhibition puts forward a survey of graphic art initiatives which have, from the 1960s to the present day, confronted urgent, politically oppressive contexts in Latin America, articulating strategies of transformation and resistance that radically changed art-making, the way in which it established intersubjective links, built communities, and even circulated graphic supports.

Curator: Southern Conceptualisms Network
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
With the support of: Embassy of the Argentine Republic