Documentos 1. Art, Words and Memory in the Texts of Gómez de Liaño
Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and Salvador Dalí in the Empordà artist’s house in Portlligat, September 12, 1978
Held on 13 Oct 2016
The programme Documentos, which revolves around themes related to the Museo Reina Sofía Documentation Centre, presents its first activity: Art, Words and Memory in the Texts of Gómez de Liaño, a round-table discussion which looks at the output of Ignacio Gómez de Liaño.
Since the 1960s, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño has written numerous texts on an array of contemporary artists, with his work reflecting the diversity of the trends and styles that distinguish these creators’ output. Equally, this quality responds to the eclectic spirit and multi-faceted personality of the author himself: a philosopher, historian, narrator, poet, translator...
In his writings, which have recently come to the fore in the collection entitled Libro de los artistas (The Book of Artists, Ediciones Asimétricas, 2016), critical analysis, sentimental memory and literary volition converge, as does a decisive premise that safeguards the unity of the whole: the friendship he maintained with each artist to which he dedicated his biographical sketches and essays. This circumstance implies not only direct knowledge of the works but also the living context, enabling him to orbit the surface of the artistic activity in order to examine the relationship between the visible and the utterable: “There is nothing like looking at the deed to know what the words mean”.
This round-table discussion features the participation of Alain Arias-Misson, Selina Blasco, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and José María Parreño, and is moderated by José Luis Gallero.
Participants
Alain Arias-Misson (Brussels, 1936) is an artist, novelist and essayist. Born to an English mother and a Belgian father, he grew up and studied in New York. He earned a degree in Greek and French Literature from Harvard University, and, in the 1960s, was a pioneer of the experimental poetry movement in Spain, along with Joan Brossa, Herminio Molero and Ignacio Gómez de Liaño. He invented “public poems”, which he created from 1967 in Brussels – and in Madrid in 1969 – citing them as a way for him to “write on the page of the street”. His works have been displayed in numerous exhibitions and have been published in anthologies in Europe, the USA, South America and Japan.
Selina Blasco (Madrid, 1959) has a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid and is a professor of Art Theory and History at the same university’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Since writing her dissertation La fundación del Escorial de fray José de Sigüenza (The Foundation of the El Escorial of Brother José de Sigüenza), she has specialised in literary art and texts on art and architecture, as well as the more general field of the relationship between text and image. Her recent publications include: Mariano Fortuny: la casa y la tela (Mariano Fortuny: House and Cloth, 2013) and Mantener las formas. La academia en y desde las prácticas artísticas (Maintaining Forms. The Academy in and from Artistic Practices, 2013).
José Luis Gallero (Barcelona, 1954) is an editor, art critic and exhibition curator. Among other works, he has published Solo se vive una vez: esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileña (You Only Live Once: Splendour and Ruin in the Madrid Movida Movement, 1991) and Heráclito: Fragmentos e interpretaciones (Heraclitus: Fragments and Interpretations, 2009). Furthermore, he has worked on preparing the editions of critical text collections on Quico Rivas, Cómo escribir de pintura sin que se note (How to Write About Painting Inconspicuously, 2011) and Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Libro de los artistas (The Book of Artists, 2016).
Ignacio Gómez de Liaño (Madrid, 1946) is a writer, philosopher and professor of Aesthetics. He has lectured at the Advanced School of Architecture, Madrid, the Faculty of Political Science and the Faculty of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as universities in Osaka and Beijing. He is a regular contributor in numerous media, and the author of works that span from poetry and theatre to art, philosophy and personal journals. His noteworthy publications include Athanasius Kircher: Itinerario del éxtasis o las imágenes de un saber universal (Athanasius Kircher: Itinerary of Ecstasy or the Images of Universal Knowledge, 1986), Iluminaciones filosóficas (Philosophical Illuminations, 2001), Sobre el fundamento (On the Foundation, 2002), En la red del tiempo. 1972 1977 (In the Network of Time, 1972-1977, 2013) and Libro de los artistas (The Book of Artists, 2016), his most recent work.
José María Parreño (Madrid, 1958) is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. He was previously deputy director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, from 1998 to 2004, and director between 2004 and 2007. He is also an art critic and exhibition curator and has published a dozen books of essays and poetry, the most recent of which include Arte y Ecología (Art and Ecology, 2014) and Pornografía para insectos (Pornography for Insects, 2015).
Más actividades
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.