Julie Doucet, cartoon strip from What an Intense City, 1992. ©Julie Doucet
Held on 30 abr 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).
![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.
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
23, 24, 25, 30, 31 OCT 2025
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros