Held on 27 Jun 2022
This day of lectures and encounters, the fourth instalment of the series organised by the inter-university 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 lectures and a final conversation, 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 a lived experience that has shaped contemporary art.
In this latest edition, the idea of the tourist city as a utopia/dystopia is explored in relation to the concept of “architecture of pleasure” developed by Henri Lefebvre in his book Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. In 1973, the French philosopher and urban planner was inspired by the work Mario Gaviria, his pupil, carried out in Benidorm. The initial title was also Gaviria’s suggestion, stemming from his view of Benidorm as a model for the future. Yet Lefebvre preferred not to speak of “pleasure” as such but jouissance, a hard-to-translate term that denotes enjoyment both beyond pleasure and also against it.
What desires did tourist cities have to arouse in their permanent or temporary residents? What were the architecture of pleasure promises and what pain did they open the way for? What dystopias have we inherited from the tourist utopias of the 1960s? These are the questions that anchor the session.
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Eugenia Afinoguénova is a professor of Spanish Literature and Cultural History at Marquette University in Milwaukee (USA). Her most recent publication is El Prado: la cultura y el ocio (1819-1939) (Cátedra, 2019), and she has also co-edited a number of anthologies, including Spain Is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Identity (Lexington Books, 2008, with Jaume Martí-Olivella) and the forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2023, with Silvina Schammah Gesser and Robert Lubar Messeri). Moreover, she has contributed to multiple anthologies focused on themes around the tourism imaginary, film and, more recently, environmental studies.
Cristina Arribas is an architect and urban planner in Badalona City Council and a professor in the Department of Theory and History at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB). Her most recent publications most notably include “El nuevo paisaje turístico español a través de las tarjetas postales de los años 60” in Sobre, No. 5 (2018) and “La puesta en escena del paisaje turístico español en el boom desarrollista” in La ciudad en el cine (Asimétricas, 2022).
Jordi Costa has been the head of the Exhibitions Department at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) since 2019. He is the author of books such as Todd Solondz. En los suburbios de la felicidad (Ocho y Medio, 2005) and Cómo acabar con la Contracultura. Una historia subterránea de España (Taurus, 2018). He has also co-curated exhibitions such as Plagiarism (La Casa Encendida, 2005–2006) and The Mask Never Lies (CCCB, 2021–2022).
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 Pamplona Encounters 1972: The End of the Party for Experimental Art (Museo Reina Sofía, 2009–2010). His most recent publications notably include his coordination of issue 10 (on art and tourism) of Concreta magazine, and “Movilizados por lo real: turistas, soldados, artistas” (on Marcel Broodthaers), in Arquitectura: lenguajes fílmicos (2009-2016) (Tabakalera, 2018).
Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero is an art historian and professor of Contemporary Spanish Art and Exhibition Curatorship at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. His main works revolve around architect Miguel Fisac, the subject of his PhD thesis. Notable among his publications are articles and texts that address different aspects of Spanish art during the 1950s and 1960s.
Julián Díaz Sánchez is a professor of Art History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). He 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).
Germán Labrador Méndez is director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Antoni Miralda is a visual artist whose work is aligned towards investigations into food-related rituals, practices and symbolism. To this end, he has worked with collaborators such as Montse Guillén and Dorothée Selz to develop projects like Honeymoon Project (different locations, 1986–1992). Since 2000, he has focused his work on the FoodCulturaMuseum, an archive related to gastronomic diversity and its ties with world cultures and which, based out of Miami and Barcelona, explores and disseminates food culture in a multidisciplinary way. In 2010, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomed his solo show Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum.
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5pm
Panel of lectures
—Presentation by José Díaz Cuyás
The Urbanism of Leisure Towards 1970
Eugenia Afinoguénova
“It is in the architecture and urbanism of leisure […] where, in a simplified manner, the full contradictions materialise that appear in consumer societies of bureaucratically led masses”, Mario Gaviria wrote in “The Urbanism of Leisure” in City and Territory No. 2 (1969). Surveying illustrated magazines from the early 1970s, this lecture gives context to the promises and failures of tourist cities in debates on the future of work, automation, mobility and social inequality after May ’68.
Images of the Tourist City
Julián Díaz Sánchez
The resurgence in 1970s Spanish painting of the Mediterranean aesthetic (at least as a topic of conversation) entails a (utopian?) vision of the tourist city. The notion of tourism slides around realist painting (or “committed”, as it was called at the time) and that which stresses the pleasure and warmth of the picture, with both revealing the notion of urban utopia.
“Utopia for Today, Dystopia for Tomorrow”. Remote Postcards
Cristina Arribas
With Americanisation as a “utopia” the starting point, Spain programmed its mass modernisation through tourist culture. Economic development approaches irremediably transformed the landscape (ideal, in theory) to turn it into a stage of literally consumed mass consumption. Postcards — also objects of tourism and consumerism — are good examples of this new world in colour and they multiplied in the developmentalist “ideal”, the seed of their destruction. Utopia or development? Postcards don’t lie, or do they?
Unique Proposals in the Landscape of Spanish Tourism. Fernando Higueras in Lanzarote
Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero
In response to the standard tourism architecture built on most Spanish coastlines during the developmentalism period, certain unique approaches sprouted, for instance the works designed by Fernando Higueras in Lanzarote. Although only some were built, all were designed in the search to integrate architecture and nature to make the island a more prosperous place through the economic driving force of tourism, but without losing the most salient aspect of its identity: the landscape. This lecture analyses the architect’s different proposals, centring on Ciudad de las Gaviotas (The City of Seagulls, 1970) located on Risco de Famara.
6pm - 6:45pm
Conversation. Colourist Utopias (Or Dystopias?) from Consumer Society. Greetings from Counterculture
Antoni Miralda and Jordi Costa
The holiday resort as a dystopian territory, variables of the concept of post-tourism and the productive paradoxes that can make an ostensibly trivial object a souvenir are some of the concepts around which this lecture pivots. A selection of noteworthy works by Antoni Miralda, able to activate some of the contradictions inherent in this ritual of the tourist experience — which, post-pandemic, appears to have survived its foretold apocalypse — will colour the different seasons of this journey.
7pm
Conclusions and Final Debate
—Moderated by Germán Labrador Méndez
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the inter-university research group TURICOM. The Tourist Experience: Image, Body and Death in the Culture of Leisure
Inside the framewrk of
TIZ 4. Slumil K’ajxemk’op (Rebel Land)
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