Julie Doucet, cartoon strip from What an Intense City, 1992. ©Julie Doucet
Held on 30 Apr 2024
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This latest instalment centres on the work of Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), a key artist in the development of underground comics in North America at the end of the twentieth century. The encounter features the participation of Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz and Camille Vannier.
During her university years in Quebec, in the late 1980s, Doucet began to disseminate her first comic strips in fanzines, magazines and in the self-edited, photocopied publication Dirty Plotte. Her work caught the eye of publications such as Weirdo magazine, created by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quaterly, which, under the above-mentioned title Dirty Plotte, gathered and published, in magazine format, her cartoon strips from 1991 to 1998. It was with Drawn & Quaterly that My New York Diary (1999) first appeared, one of her standout works and an example of her transgressive style with an undercurrent of finesse and melancholy.
Carrying on the legacy of the comix underground of women cartoonists from the 1970s — with pioneering artists such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Diane Noomin and Trina Robbins, and publications like Wimmen’s Comix (1972–1992), Twisted Sisters (1976–1994) and Tits & Clits (1973–1979) — Julie Doucet’s cartoon strips display unreserved feminism which does not shy away from tackling themes such as sexuality, menstruation or the risqué obsessions that take hold of the female cartoonist through her oneiric subconscious. All of which is channelled through a variegated, explosive graphic art, in the expressionistic black and white Doucet pointedly uses to transmit, or rather scream out, her concerns, observations and insecurities. The transgressive themes of her work have sparked controversy even within the feminist movement, with certain specialist bookshops refusing to sell her works, considering their content to be violent towards women.
Around the year 2000, she began to move away from the world of comics, working, from that point on, in disciplines such as illustration, collage and poetry. Nevertheless, she remains a reference point in contemporary autobiographical comics, her work splicing previous and more recent generations. The comprehensive publication of her comics by the publisher Fulgencio Pimentel between 2015 and 2017 has contributed to her recognition in a Spanish-language context.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Centro José Guerrero (Provincial Council of Granada) and La Madraza. Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (University of Granada)
Collaboration
illycaffè
Acknowledgements
Editorial Fulgencio Pimentel
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Julie Doucet is a cartoonist and artist. She studied Graphic Art at the Université du Québec and began to self-publish her first cartoon strips at the end of the 1980s. Her work has been honoured with the Harvey Award for Best New Talent, in 1981, the Canadian Comic Book Hall of Fame Award, in 2017, and the Grand Prix del Festival de Angoulême, in 2022. Since moving away from the world of comics — only returning sporadically in projects such as My New York Diary (2010), in collaboration with film-maker Michael Gondry — she has developed her work in spheres such as collage, in Journal (L’Association, 2004) and J comme Je: Essais d’autobiographie (Seuil, 2006), and poetry, with À l’école de l’amour (L’Oie de Cravan, 2006).In 2022, she returned to the realm of comics with El río, published in Spanish by Fulgencio Pimentel.
Raquel Jimeno coordinates the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural and Audiovisual Activities
Regina López Muñoz is a literary translator who specialises in comic books. She has translated over 150 titles for publishers such as Salamandra Graphic, Fulgencio Pimentel, Sapristi and Blackie Books, and the authors she has translated to Spanish most notably include Nine Antico, Joann Sfar, Zuzu, Lizzy Stewart, Julia Wertz, David B., Posy Simmonds, Gipi, Olivier Schrauwen, Manuele Fior, Igort, Sarah Glidden and Raymond Briggs. She also teaches course and workshops and participates in encounters with authors.
Camille Vannier is a visual artist and illustrator who has worked for journals and magazines such as El Jueves, Vice and Pandora Magazine. Furthermore, she has published different graphic novels in which she narrates personal stories and the environment surrounding her, for instance El horno no funciona (Sins Entido, 2011), Tuerca y Tornillo (Apa-Apa Cómics, 2013), Poulou y el resto de mi familia (Sapristi, 2018) and Imbécil (Caramba, 2024).
Más actividades
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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.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.