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
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.