Joaquín Torres García, Constructivo en blanco y negro “TBA” (Black and White Constructive, “TBA”), 1933
© Sucesión Joaquín Torres García, Montevideo, 2015
Held on 08 Nov 2024
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Joaquín Torres García (Montevideo, 1874–1949), one of the foremost artists in a rereading of modernity from the South. To commemorate this landmark year, the Museo Reina Sofía and the Embassy of Uruguay organise a round-table discussion centred on his career and relevance, featuring the participation of art historians Juan Manuel Bonet and Andrea Giunta, Alejandro Díaz Lageard, director of the Museo Torres García, and the artist Ana Tiscornia. It also includes a presentation by Ana Teresa Ayala, a Uruguayan ambassador to Spain, and Manuel Segade, the director of the Museo Reina Sofía.
Torres García, whose work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, is the founder of an art movement called Constructive Universalism, comprising Indigenous and popular roots within the structure of constructivist language. Through this current, the artist put forward a synthesis between the rational and the spiritual, the contemporary and the ancestral, and between North and South, offering a mode of seeing, understanding and representing modernity from Latin America. Furthermore, he was an artist-educator and the founder of art schools which would influence the cultural and artistic development of Uruguay and the region, for instance the Taller Torres García in Montevideo, a pedagogical endeavour combining craft and the avant-garde of Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College. On account of his adaptation of constructivist abstraction to a Latin American language and his educational work, Torres García today represents a contemporary paradigm of the internationalist artist from the South, the educator and someone with a profound awareness of his own identity.
During the round-table, Juan Manuel Bonet will explore Torres García’s relationship with Spain; Andrea Giunta will examine the artist’s relevance by fixing the gaze on a specific work; Alejandro Díaz Lageard will speak of the new edition of the Constructive Universalism manifesto and the currency of the proposal; and Ana Tiscornia will comment on the generational relationship she and a group of international Latin American artists from the 1970s have with Torres García. Attendants will be offered a drink upon the activity’s conclusion, courtesy of the Embassy of Uruguay.
Within the framework of
Joaquín Torres García 150 años
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía y Embajada de la República Oriental del Uruguay
Participants
Ana Teresa Ayala has been a Uruguayan ambassador to Spain since October 2020, undertaking wide-ranging work to promote the bilateral relations between Uruguay and Spain and thus fostering agreements in education and international cooperation.
Juan Manuel Bonet is an art historian, writer and art and literary critic. He was the director of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) from 1995 to 2000 and director of the Museo Reina Sofía from 2000 to 2004, in addition to the director of the Instituto Cervantes in Paris from 2012 to 2018. He is currently the president of the Rafael Cansinos Assens Archive Foundation and the International Committee of the Vicente Huidobro Foundation. Moreover, he is the author of the reference work Diccionario de las vanguardias en España (1907-1936) and is a specialist in the history of early modernity in Spain, the subject of numerous exhibitions he has curated.
Alejandro Díaz Lageard is the director and curator of the Museo Torres García and a member of the foundation under the same name. He has organised over twenty exhibitions on the work of Joaquín Torres García in museums in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Spain, and is the managing editor of the museum’s publications. He also jointly wrote the script to the feature-length film PAX IN LUCEM (2024), a documentary on the work of the artist.
Andrea Giunta is an art historian. A lecturer in modern and contemporary art (twentieth and twenty-first centuries) and art from Latin America and the Caribbean (from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century) at the University of Buenos Aires, she has published essays that most notably include Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política. Arte argentino de los sesenta (Siglo XXI, 2001), Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoamericano (Siglo XXI, 2011) and Feminismo y arte latinoamericano. Historias de artistas que emanciparon el cuerpo (Siglo XXI, 2018). Moreover, she has curated exhibitions such as Mercosur Biennial 12: Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions and Affections (2020) and, with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, at the Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2017–2019).
Manuel Segade is the director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Ana Tiscornia is an artist and lecturer. An emeritus professor at the State University of New York (SUNY), she is one of the most internationally renowned Uruguayan artists. She has received awards and honours such as the Konex Mercosur Award (2022), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2004) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2000), and also represented Uruguay at the Second and Ninth Havana Biennials and the Third Biennial of Lima, as well as participating at the Fourth Biennial of the End of the World in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Her work has been exhibited in Latin America, the USA and Europe. She is the author of Vicissitudes of the Visual Imaginary: Between Utopia and Fragmented Identity (White Wine Press, 2007).
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
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.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.