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.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.