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
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.