Art and Tourism Imaginaries I
Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach: Otto Muehl’s Commune in the Canary Islands
Held on 05 jun 2018
This lecture leads into an annual series which explores the relationship between tourism imaginaries and the visual arts from 1960 onwards. In collaboration with the inter-university research group TURICOM. The Tourist Experience: The Image, Body and Death in Leisure Culture, the Museo will present, once a year, a case study which reflects upon the way in which mass tourism, as an industry of experience, has been linked to the search for experience characterising art since 1960.
Relevant inside this frame of reference, and part of the group’s line of research, is an analysis of the paradoxical process of modernisation that began in the later years of Franco’s Spain, whereby economic internationalisation was dependent upon the re-creation of local customs and cultural elites aspired to an imported cosmopolitan modernity. Thus Spain’s most experimental avant-garde movements made headway inside this contradictory tension from the 1960s and 1970s onwards.
The first lecture in the series, therefore, presents a research project initiated by José Díaz Cuyás, art historian and coordinator of the TURICOM group, and taken and developed further by the artist Ralph Kistler, who focuses on the El Cabrito commune, analysing the context which bore witness to the emergence of these utopian-inspired communities and their hope of emancipatory freedom, often resulting in opposing experiences which were devoured by internal contradictions and ideological perversions. The analysis of this case also calls for a consideration of its impact on the rise of tourism in Spain, the support for selling public spaces in the early years of democracy, the innovative art movements after the 1970s that were part of El Cabrito, and the tensions between new permissive behaviour and lingering moral restrictions.
El Cabrito, founded by Viennese artist Otto Muehl in 1987, was a leafy ravine on the island of La Gomera, a colony which would prolong what he had created before, in 1973, close to Vienna as he developed the idea of an art-life fusion through the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Actionism. This model sought to establish political and social order based on sexual freedom, collective property and free creativity, chiming with an international context open to similar experiences. In just a few years, the commune grew rapidly to become one of the greatest countercultural spaces in twentieth-century Europe.
In the early 1990s, however, El Cabrito became the focus of criticism from the Spanish and international media, largely due to the scandal surrounding Otto Muehl’s imprisonment in Austria for different sex offences. El Cabrito would eventually peter out in 1992 and today the commune is a rural tourist destination based on sustainable agriculture, yet with an awareness of its turbulent past: Ultimately, it remains the final stage in which the emancipatory mythology of the commune was broken down and drained by its own internal contradictions.
In collaboration with
the inter-university group TURICOM. The Tourist Experience: The Image, Body and Death in Leisure Culture
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
José Díaz Cuyás is an art historian and professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of La Laguna. He has curated exhibitions such as Ir y venir de Valcárcel Medina (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Sala de Verónicas and Centro José Guerrero, 2002) and The Pamplona Encounters 1972: The End of the Party for Experimental Art (Museo Reina Sofía, 2008). He also coordinates the research group TURICOM. The Tourist Experience: The Image, Body and Death in Leisure Culture and directed issue 10 of the magazine Concreta, focused on the relationship between art and tourism.
Ralph Kistler is an artist and author of the largest research project to date on Otto Muehl and the El Cabrito community, also the subject of his doctoral thesis La modernidad y los territorios del ocio: el caso de El Cabrito en La Gomera (Modernity and Leisure Territories: The Case of El Cabrito on La Gomera, 2014).
![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.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.