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
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
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.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Inclusive Policies and Practices
19, 20 JUN 2026
In conjunction with World Refugee Day, which takes place on 20 June 2026, Museo Situado and GRIGRI jointly organise this international encounter to foster the discussions, debates and exchange of practices which uphold solidarity with migrant people in European Union countries.
The programme, conceived as a space of exchange and the collective construction of knowledge, comprises a workshop of collaborative creation, discussions, a community meal and a film forum — activities designed by a local committee made up of young people under the age of thirty from different territories in Europe. The policy recommendations on welcoming people with migrant backgrounds and hospitality in urban contexts that arise from this encounter will be presented in Brussels at the end of 2026.
These sessions are developed within the context of the European cooperation project Bridging Borders and are framed inside the tenth anniversary of the GRIGRI Pixel project.