Art and Tourism Imaginaries III
Ruins Under Construction. The Attraction of the Inhospitable
Held on 01 Dec 2021
This lecture series, the third instalment organised by the interuniversity group TURICOM — which is part of the project Paradoxical Modernity: Artistic and Tourist Experience in Developmentalist Spain (1959–1975), PGC2018-093422-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) — endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. By virtue of a selection of brief talks and a final lecture, followed by a debate, it looks to reflect on mass tourism and the way in which, as the industry of experience, it is connected to the search for lived experience that has shaped art ever since. More specifically, this new edition centres on the concept of ruin as a centre of attraction for cultural habits and practices inside the sphere of tourism.
Tourist enclaves maintain a unique relationship with ruin. Not solely because of the sheer number of establishments and infrastructures we might come across in a state of disrepair or ruin, but also because of their tendency to create, in their surroundings, exclusion zones and razed landscapes and, above all else, their proclivity to be erected in deserted spaces. It is no coincidence that the most paradigmatic place in the tourist industry is Las Vegas, a city built in a desert. The desert — along with the sea, snow, and forested and alpine areas — was one of the favourite scenes in the aesthetic of the sublime, that idealised attraction to inhospitable nature which in Romanticism renewed a liking for ruin. Untamed landscapes that were the hidden face of an irreversible process of technification. Opposite the ostensible mastery of technology, the nostalgia for nature buoyed a new idea of untainted spaces, the pictorial spectacle of unique, out-of-scale nature which banished the human figure from landscapes whose chief symbolic quality consisted of, in fact, being uninhabitable.
That uninhabitable nature came to “sublimate” problems of habitability in the modern city. When the urbanite dreamed of the spectacle of free and primeval nature, or places where life was more natural, the nascent tourist industry safeguarded this dream, feeding and monetising the ideal. Since then, tourism has continued to bolster the paradoxical attraction of the inhospitable and, as city life deepened the feeling of malaise, the tourist-based trivialisation of the sublime offered comfortable lodgings in remote locations that were temptingly inhospitable and, consequently, unliveable for us. This contradictory desire to inhabit the uninhabitable is met by the industry, which erects enclaves on emptiness and builds accommodation and entertainment infrastructures that tap into the illusionary image of an authentic place, yet without being part of it. Thus, the tendency of these settings to fall into disrepair and decay, with their only role being to monetise the flow of people, remains exposed to their transitory nature, subjected to the fate of shifting currents. But there is another thing: the production of habitats to enjoy the comfort of the inhospitable is the furthest possible thing from hospitality. A clear indication that its implementation is not aimed at the community creation of place, but rather at its decline.
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Eugenia Afinoguénova is a professor of Spanish Literature and Cultural History at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA). Her most recent publication is El Prado: la cultura y el ocio (1819-1939) (Cátedra, 2019).
Manuel Delgado Ruiz holds a PhD in Anthropology and is a professor at the University of Barcelona. Since 1984, he has been head professor of Religious Anthropology in the Social Anthropology Department at the same university. He is also the editor and author of numerous publications, most notably: El animal público (Premio Anagrama de Ensayo, 1999), Sociedades movedizas (Anagrama, 2007) and La ciudad mentirosa. Fraude y miseria del “modelo Barcelona” (Catarata, 2007).
José Díaz Cuyás is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of La Laguna. With Carmen Pardo and Esteban Pujals, he curated the exhibition Pamplona Encounters 1972. The End of the Party for Experimental Art (Museo Reina Sofía, 2009–2010), and his most recent publications include coordinating issue 10 (on art and tourism) of the magazine Concreta, and “Movilizados por lo real: turistas, soldados, artistas” (on Marcel Broodthaers), in Arquitectura: lenguajes fílmicos (2009-2016) (Tabakalera, 2018).
Julián Díaz Sánchez is a professor of Art History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), and has written, among other works, Políticas, poéticas y prácticas artísticas. Apuntes para una historia del arte (Catarata, 2009), La idea de arte abstracto en la España de Franco (Cátedra, 2013) and Pensar la historia del arte. Viejas y nuevas propuestas (Universidad de Zaragoza, 2021).
Pablo Estévez Hernández holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of La Laguna and is a professor of Anthropology from the same university. Moreover, he is a professor of Anthropology of Tourism at the Iriarte University School of Tourism. Notable among his publications are: “What about the hardcore? Pensando el turismo, el poder y la transculturación en Canarias” in ¡Autonomía! ¡Automatización! (TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, 2019) and “El bautismo de una isla. Sobre ese terrible acto de nombrar” in Desmitificación y redescubrimiento de las Fortunatae Insulae. Tenerife y Canarias de los siglos I al XV (Minutes from the 8th BIEREHITE Sessions, Museo de Historia y Antropología de Tenerife, 2019).
Alicia Fuentes Vega holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History. In 2018, she joined the Art History Department at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she co-directs the research group Imaginaries. Cultural Processes in Western Contemporaneity. Her publications include articles in academic journals such as Journal of Tourism History, Iberoamericana o Art in Translation, most notably Bienvenido, Mr. Turismo. Cultura visual del boom (Cátedra, 2017).
Isaac Marrero is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. His publications most notably include de Antropología en la Universidad de Barcelona. Entre sus publicaciones se encuentran The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, with Hilary Powell (Marshgate Press, 2012), and Reassembling Activism, Activating Assemblages, with Denise Milstein and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt (Routledge, 2019).
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Programme
5pm Presentation
José Díaz Cuyás
5:10pm The Horizon of Spanish Tourism’s Extractivism
Eugenia Afinoguénova
In 1962, Ediciones del Movimiento published Nuevo horizonte del turismo Español (The New Horizon of Spanish Tourism). Attributed to Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the future designer of tourist-based developmentalism, the book offered a strategy for converting economic and social underdevelopment into a tourist attraction by means of controlled preservation. This talk, therefore, delves into the consequences of this strategy, still visible today, contending the start-up of processes to redistribute the symbolic and material assets which allowed the tourist industry to be equated with extractivism.
5:25pm Between Desolation and Promise. The (Symbolic) Construction of the Spanish Tourism Landscape
Julián Díaz Sánchez
Built upon ruin, the tourist landscape — glistening, new, ludic — appeared as some kind of miracle, consumed as a spectacle (the second definition of the term landscape in the María Moliner Dictionary of Spanish Usage was: “the countryside considered as a spectacle”. The process of (mythical) construction can be traced back to literature and painting, which, on many occasions, appear to engender nostalgia.
5:40pm The Strange Thing Is that it Remains a Hotel. A New Theory of Broken Windows for Tourism
Pablo Estévez Hernández
In a dilapidated hotel we can make out telephones which are still connected, fire extinguishers lined up, dust-covered glasses, and every kind of sign stating rules to workers. The windows are smashed and there are no tourists… Yet, isn’t there the distinct feeling that it not only remains a hotel, but is also a happy place? Can something so unstable and undefinable such as tourism endure in things? This talk looks to provide an answer to these questions.
5:55pm Politics and Aesthetics of Suspension. Monument to Tolerance by Eduardo Chillida
Isaac Marrero
This presentation explores an unbuilt project which is not completely abandoned: Chillida’s Monument of Tolerance. The concept of suspension enables us to think about a form of existence characterised by a multiple temporality (between anticipation and nostalgia) and a distributed materiality (maquettes, simulations and budget allocations).
6:10pm Review of Argument Strands from the Lectures and Debate
—Moderated by Alicia Fuentes Vega
6:40pm Break
7:00pm Master lecture. On the Ruins of the Present. Cultural Infrastructures in Disagreeable Environments
Manuel Delgado Ruiz
8:40pm Debate and conclusion
Participants
Participants
![Joan Rabascall. Every Day a Fiesta [Cada día una fiesta], 1975](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/espana-g.gif.webp)
Más actividades
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25th March, 2026 – 7.00pm
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Feni’s work. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela addresses the trauma of apartheid from both aesthetic and oneiric perspectives. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museum’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24th March, 2026 – 6.30pm
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museum from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra