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
![Isabel Coixet, 100 Years and You Everywhere [100 años y tú en todos los sitios], 2026, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/2.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
John Berger and Isabel Coixet. Continued Ways of Seeing
Thursday, 17 September 2026 at 7pm
Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.
The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.
![Chantal Akerman, Woman Sitting after Killing [Mujer sentada después de matar], 2001, instalación. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/chantal-akerman-mujer-sentada-despues-matar.jpg.webp)
On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge
18, 19 SEP 2026
The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.
In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art.
Godard and Miéville: Time and Ruin
Friday, 18 September 2026 - 7pm
Inside the framework of the conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge, this film series sets forth three critical visions of the museum via three sessions featuring the works of John Berger, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ariella Azoulay, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker, Kwate Nee-Owoo, and the premiere of short films by Isabel Coixet and La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado). In classical theory, the museum gives the world meaning; it contains fragments of the past, granting them a history, a narrative that explains preterite time and the present. Today, there is an implicit assumption that this function hides and legitimises forms of power, yet what if the museum, instead of explaining the world, multiplied it through radical ideas, silenced periods and repressed subjects? Such is the approach of the film-makers and artists in this film season.
In 1972 the writer John Berger opened the landmark television series Ways of Seeing with an iconoclastic gesture: slicing Sandro Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars (1485) in London’s National Gallery. A transgressive act that recalls contemporary attacks on the museum by dissident youth and with which Berger, after revealing it was a reproduction, sought to ignite debate around the idea of an original artwork and a copy. In this, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first session pays homage to one of the great art writers of the twentieth century. Starting with a review of Berger’s audiovisual work by art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola, the series begins with the premiere of 100 Years and You Everywhere (2026), an unreleased short film by Isabel Coixet composed as a beautifully crafted letter to Berger, and continues with an analysis of fragments of Ways of Seeing in relation to the museum and contemporary art.
The second session screens two medium-length films by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville on time, ruin and museum. In The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century (1999), both film-makers consider what remains of that “old place”, the museum, at the close of a century of wars and totalitarianism, and ask whether it should be more of a legend or desire than a place. This same driving principle leads Godard to build his own imaginary museum in Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006), a rickety toy museum which, paradoxically, contains the great film-maker’s full power of thought on history and images.
Finally, the third session explores one of the major challenges of recent years: the decolonisation of the museum, the recognition of its link to imperialist discourses of power and the need to situate a new silenced or repressed subject at the centre of the Western narration of history. Under the title Museums and Restitution, it includes the film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), by theorist Ariella Azoulay, Statues Also Die, by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker (1953), Kwate Nee-Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and the first screening of the short film Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), by La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado), filmed at the Museo de América in Madrid.
![Ariella Azoulay, Un-documented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder [Indocumentados. Desaprendiendo el saqueo imperial], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/5.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
Museums and Restitution
Saturday, 19 September 2026 - 7pm
Centuries of plundering, decades of amnesia, years of living with unmitigated extractivist power… Does a museum, as we know it, have a raison d'être in a postcolonial society?
This session expounds the operations of the museum as a colonial machine, while putting forward ideas, in narration, for a more just, equal and inclusive institution of the future via society’s marginalised and minority voices. The session begins with the international premiere of Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), which presents a vision of the Quimbaya Collection (fifth and sixth centuries CE) from the Museo de América in Madrid. It is constructed with the voices and chants of Wayúu mourners and guides, not only as a way of reinstating the role of these gold idols — anthropomorphic figures of men and women used as vessels in ritual practices — but also to imagine that what must be exhibited is not the gold itself. It is the ritual’s own chant. In the classic film You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian film-maker Kwate Nee-Owoo accesses the British Museum’s collection of African art, located in the building’s basement, to question the meaning behind a museum plundering and nullifying. A fine exercise of first-person institutional critique screened for the first time in Spain. Almost seventy years since Resnais and Marker made Statues Also Die (1953), a reflection on the aura-bearing value of the museum opposite the identity-based and cultural belonging of African art, theorist Ariella Azoulay films the same statues again at the Musée du Trocadéro (today the Musée du Quai Branly), which survive and wait to be reunited with their people. Azoulay, whose wholly original undertaking is a lesson to the museum of the future, connects the forced migration of these sculptures with the mass transit of people crossing borders artificially imposed by the same system that has plundered their culture.
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation
From 21 to 24 September 2026
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation (S.T.I.L.O.) is a programme of joint learning and join strategy which sets in motion a process for the exchange of questions, methodologies and experiences between cultural organisations. The overall aim is to create, circulate and prototype tactics, tools and collective knowledge on institutional practices that open new channels for defending culture and advocating structural transformation in divergent geographical contexts.
The project is part of the Laboratorio de Institucionalidad Compartida (The Laboratory of Shared Institutionalism, LIC), a space for the Museo Reina Sofía’s research, work and advocacy centred on developing, experimenting with and systemising practices, protocols and tools which contribute to a fairer and more liveable cultural ecosystem.
For many years now, so-called infrastructural critique in museums questions material, legal and economic infrastructures, among others, as well as the forms of solidarity and practices required to sustain the cultural ecosystem. By approaching current debates, S.T.I.L.O. raises questions on the ways in which organisations define and interpret their practices, organise their relations and respond to the social contexts in which they operate.
The school gathers four cultural organisations that work via different institutional models – scale, contexts, conditions, different working models — with the goal of pooling common strategies and tools of organisation, advocacy and relationships with local communities.
The programme is conceived as a collaborative process with the participation of Arika, La Revuelta, BAK Basecamp and The Tentacular Museum (Museo Reina Sofía) and is structured around preparatory online sessions and an in-person seminar in Madrid.
S.T.I.L.O. is an activity framed inside the working strand of Situated Organisations from L'Internationale’s Museum of the Commons project, which reflects on the role of museums and art organisations as actors within complex social networks and ecosystems, with a view to exploring new ways to democratise institutions and make them more open, inclusive and useful.