Held on 09 Mar 2024
This encounter seeks to share the texts of Cuban researcher and curator Tamara Díaz Bringas (1973–2022) in the form of a collective reading and dance. The texts, gathered in the volume Todas las vidas (All Lives) [consonni, 2024], edited by Aurora Carmenate Díaz, are the pretext for celebrating the forms of making and the networks Díaz Bringas wove throughout her life.
Díaz Bringas lived and worked for a decade in Costa Rica and the last thirteen years of her life in Spain. Always engaged with the networks she helped to entwine wherever she was, she drove forward multiple projects and spaces — she was a curator and editor with TEOR/ética, and oversaw the 10th Central American Art Biennial and the 31st Pontevedra Biennial. She was also a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, a coordinator and curator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Exhibitions Department and the general coordinator of the Museo’s Public Activities.
Her texts resound with the rhythm of two of her preferred pleasures encompassing body and movement: swimming and dancing. From the members of the reading group Respirar (Breathe) and the affective circle of Tamaristas, and with Idoia Zabaleta as a guide and the presence of Élan d’Orphium, the attendees read dancing and dance reading words written across almost three decades. All of this is situated in the specific contexts and urgencies of Cuba, Central America and Spain, places where she lived and the artistic debates of which contributed from what she termed a “proximate critique”.
Through Díaz Bringas, writing is understood as being in the world which is highly attuned to listening and mutual understanding, imagining desirable futures where not creating alone is a political and daily act. This encounter and the book constitute a collective gesture of the many lives she touched to show an appreciation for her work and make it more visible.
The encounter is part of the special programme the Museo devotes to ARCOmadrid 2024 and its theme this year: The Shore, the Tide, the Current: an Oceanic Caribbean.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the framework of
ARCOmadrid
Participants
Aurora Carmenate Díaz holds a degree in Art History from the University of Havana, where she worked as a professor of Latin American Art for three years. She curated the Cuban contemporary art project El Apartamento (2017–2020) and associated shows from the 13th Havana Biennial. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art History from the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía, and some of her critical texts feature in the independent art and literature magazine Rialta.
consonni is an independent publisher with a cultural space in the San Francisco neighbourhood in Bilbao. It has produced cultural critique since 1996 and currently commits to the written word and also the whispered, heard, silenced, recited word, the word turned into action, into body. Written in lower case and constantly mutating, consonni is an androgynous, multi-headed creature, with feminisms and listening as superpowers, that looks to affect the world it inhabits and to be affected by it. Among other actions, it amplifies extraordinary voices in book form and creates contexts to read, dance, sing and discuss them collectively.
Élan d’Orphium (a.k.a. Pablo García Martínez) is an artist. His work sets forth re-readings of gender in a broad sense via a confabulating interpretation of listenings, gestures and observations with species from other kingdoms. He has participated in projects for Intermediae (Madrid, 2018), the programmes ¿Pero… esto es arte? (2019) and Picnic sessions in CA2M (Móstoles, 2023), Visual Arts Circuits from the Community of Madrid (Madrid, 2021), the Matadero Centres of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid, 2021), the National Classical Theatre Company (Madrid, 2022), Schwules Museum (Berlin, 2022) and the Injuve Youth Institute (Madrid, 2023).
'Respirar' is a space upheld by a group of workers from the Museo Reina Sofía and with the presence of other proximate people to share texts and be affected by them. It was set up in the early days of lockdown in 2020, under an initiative by the Museo’s Public Activities team, and was promoted by Tamara Díaz Bringas. After stopping for a time, the second phase of this space came from March to September 2023, in parallel with the gestation of the book Todas las vidas (All Lives).
'Tamaristas' is the colloquial name of a broad network of people united around Tamara Díaz Bringas and the practice of care. It is also the name of the WhatsApp group comprised of these people as a modest thread uniting them all.
Idoia Zabaleta is a choreographer and biologist. Since 2000, she has co-produced and created her own work, collaborating with other artists and researchers like Isabel de Naverán, Filipa Francisco, Antonio Tagliarini, Ixiar Rozas and Jaime Conde Salazar, among others. Her work has been on view at international festivals and encounters. In 2013, she created the work Leer y Bailar (Read and Dance), and, in 2022, presented the performance lecture of Lumbung stories with consonni at documenta fifteen. Since 2008, with Juan González, she has tended to and directed the AZALA space of artistic creation and residencies.
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
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.