Held on 11 Jul 2023
This session, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets out to explore the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. The activity looks to reflect on the difficulty, and urgency, of imagining a world after, or beyond, tourism, with the programme comprising a compendium of brief lectures and a subsequent presentation of specific case studies by architecture and urbanism teams involved in re-wilding environments affected by tourism exploitation.
On one side, the tourist industry’s carbon footprint positions it as one of the main forces of environmental transformation; on the other, the touristification of urban centres lays bare its devastating impact on housing, neighbourhood fabric and local trade. Nevertheless, in Spain the tourism-progress-modernisation equation, which began under Francoism, still dominates the institutional logic of the State to a large degree.
This session thinks about the need to jettison that which presents itself as inevitable. The task of recomposing relations and ecologies in a hypothetical post-tourism scenario means to pinpoint practices from which to learn and sensibilities to enhance; thus a series of architectural and artistic interventions are discussed which provide us with tools and images to cultivate other (im)possible worlds.
6pm
Lectures
—Presented by José Díaz Cuyás
After the Party: The Provincial Pavilions at the International Country Fair in Madrid
With Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero
An exploration of how ephemeral architecture at international fairs is disconnected from the events that gave it meaning and purpose, offering us a first possible image of post-tourism.
Modernity and Progress, Made in the USA. Progress follows fiasco
With Cristina Arribas
The future lives of constructions offered by an image of progress provide a unique point of view from which to question the relationship between modernity, architecture and environment. This relationship is expressed fundamentally in the visual language of postcards and, more specifically, in the construction of the Mediterranean coast as a space of progress according to representational codes imported from the USA.
Dirty Beaches. Equipo Crónica and the End of (Tourist) Utopia
With Julián Díaz Sánchez
The counter-image of the tourism, modernity and progress equation can be found in the series Paisajes urbanos (Urban Landscapes) by Equipo Crónica, where the beach appears more as a place of emptiness and waste.
7:15pm
Case Studies
—Presented by Isaac Marrero
Presentation of n’UNDO (Madrid)
With Verónica Sánchez Carrera
This case study analyses the project to deconstruct and recover the Algabarrico beach in Almería. It constitutes a financial, ecological and pedagogical project of coastal recovery i.e. the (re)construction of relationships between citizens and environment through the dismantling of an infrastructure declared illegal, but which lingers on, regardless. By way of different social, environmental, technical and economic approaches, the idea of turning hotels into a centre of environmental recovery via workshops with different areas is set forth here, and with the priority involvement of local spheres, thereby establishing a benchmark model of innovation and development.
Presentation of Life Pletera (Girona)
With Xavier Quintana Pou and Esteve Subirah
An exposition of the de-urbanisation and environmental restoration project which has managed to ensure the recovery of La Pletera (Girona), a marshland of significant environmental worth that was partially urbanised at the end of the 1980s, but has been left abandoned since the 1990s. Inside the framework of this project, a series of artistic interventions are incorporated under the heading Lloc, memoria i salicornies, giving rise to a reflection on a complex landscape and considering the same idea of regeneration as a problem through an approach to the memory of place.
8:15pm
Q&A Session
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and TURICOM. The Tourist Experience, PGC2018-093422-B-I00
Collaboration
Inside the framework of
Participants
Cristina Arribas is an architect and urban planner at Badalona City Council, and a professor in the Department of Theory and History at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB). Her recent publications most notably include “El nuevo paisaje turístico español a través de las tarjetas postales de los años 60” (The New Landscape of Spanish Tourism Through 1960s Postcards) in Sobre, issue 5 (2018) and “La puesta en escena del paisaje turístico español en el boom desarrollista” (The Mise en Scène of the Spanish Tourism Landscape During the Developmentalist Boom), in La ciudad en el cine (Asimétricas, 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 exhibition The Pamplona Encounters 1972: The End of the Party for Experimental Art (Museo Reina Sofía, 2009–2010). His most recent publishing projects include coordinating issue 10 (on art and tourism) of the magazine Concreta and the publication “Movilizados por lo real: turistas, soldados, artistas” (sobre Marcel Broodthaers) [Mobilized by the Real: Tourists, Soldiers, Artists] (on Marcel Broodthaers), in Arquitectura: lenguajes fílmicos (2009-2016) (Tabakalera, 2018).
Ramón Vicente Díaz del Campo Martín-Mantero is an art historian, a professor of Contemporary Spanish Art and an exhibition curator at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). His central works revolve around the architect Miguel Fisac, the subject of his doctoral thesis, and his publications most notably include articles and texts which approach different aspects of Spanish art during the 1950s and 1960s.
Julián Díaz Sánchez is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). He is the author of, 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).
Xavier Quintana Pou is a lecturer of Ecology at the Institut d’Ecologia Aquàtica from the Universitat de Girona. He is also the director of Càtedra d’Ecosistemes Litorals Mediterranis, which aims to contribute to the study, management and recovery of natural spaces in Bajo Ter. Within this framework, he has carried out different ecological restoration projects in coastal wetlands, for instance the project Life Pletera.
Isaac Marrero is a professor of Anthropology at the Universitat de Barcelona. His publications include The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State (Marshgate Press, 2012), with Hilary Powell, and Reassembling Activism, Activating Assemblages (Routledge, 2019), with Denise Milstein and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt.
Verónica Sánchez Carrera is an architect who currently lectures on MA and post-graduate courses at different universities. She also works for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on emergency infrastructures for infectious diseases. She is the co-founder of the n´UNDO organisation and the technical office n’OT | Global-Human-Environment.
Esteve Subirah is a visual artist who investigates issues of representation related to memory and landscape, combining documentary and conceptual practices. He has participated in different exhibitions and projects like Lloc, memòria i salicornia inside the context of the de-urbanisation of La Pletera with the in-situ and permanent intervention Forma 26 Pletera and Fingers Crossed (ADN Platform), a collective show curated by Blanca de la Torre and Sue Spaid which tackles the current ecological crisis.
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
Dear Felix:
Saturdays at 6pm
The immediately recognisable art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which is on display, from May to October 2026, in the show Sweet Revenge, moves beyond the transmission of messages laden with poetic evocation, vital or biographical reflection, or even a clear political or ethical positioning. Rather, it seeks an active response by visitors to the exhibition. His work invites engagement with these messages so that, whether delighting, moving or challenging, it still prompts viewers to participate in the dialogue and complete the artistic undertaking with their own actions.
Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
1926–2026: One Hundred Years of the Lyceum Club Femenino
Thursday, 2 July 2026
The Lyceum Club Femenino (Lyceum Women’s Club) was established in Madrid in 1926, constituting a space which opened new pathways for women to participate in Spain’s intellectual, artistic and political life in the first third of the twentieth century, and for figures such as designer Victorina Durán, pedagogue María de Maeztu, lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and artist Ángeles Santos, to name but a few. To mark the Madrid Club’s one hundredth anniversary, this research symposium examines its role as a key place for studying women’s and feminist culture in Spain’s Silver Age by analysing and vindicating the different agencies, trajectories and cultural projects that structured the space.
By way of three lectures and two round-table discussions, the symposium sets forth a journey through the Lyceum Club Femenino and the cultural context from which it emerged, from its standing as a pioneering institution to the study of cultural material from the period and the process of constructing the figure of the “modern woman”. These talks and discussions look to shed light on how new ways of thinking, creating and occupying public space were shaped, expanding the gaze on cultural, educational and social networks linked to the Lyceum — as much concerning its ties with other intellectual and artistic circles as the continuity and transformation of these networks during Republican exile. Finally, the symposium features three artistic interventions conceived to recover the artistic legacy of this space in Madrid.
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the Ministry of Culture’s cultural programme focused on the centenary of the Lyceum Club Femenino via these sessions, co-organised with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
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.