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).
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.