Eileen Myles. Photograph: Shae Detar
This activity is centred on Eileen Myles, one of the most unique voices in poetry and an international figure of LGBTQI+ literature, in an encounter which takes the form of a lecture and recital and also features the participation of journalist Nerea Pérez de las Heras and her reading of the manifesto I Want a President (1992), by artist Zoe Leonard and the poet Flor Braier in moderating the conversation.
In their direct and confessional writing, Myles explores themes of gender, sexuality and body, their style characterised by first-person prose replete with humour and social critique, where personal life and political activism intertwine to form a key voice in the visibility of LGTBQI+ rights. Their best-known works most notably include Chelsea Girls (1994, translated into Spanish by Las Afueras, 2024), an autobiographical novel which narrates Myles’s youth in New York’s underground scene and sketches the construction of a personality that refuses to be typecast or yield to any conventions; I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (2016), a compilation of forty years of confessional poetry, and Pathetic Literature (2022), an anthology published by Myles which brings together work by different writers around the idea of the pathetic.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Myles was an active participant in New York’s culture scene — along with such icons as Patti Smith, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker and Robert Mapplethorpe — and in 1992 they ran for president of the United States as part of a satirical campaign denouncing the exclusion in the electoral system of those who did not respond to the male pattern of power. This stance, straddling performance and institutional critique, bolstered their status as a counterculture figure and prompted the artist Zoe Leonard to write I Want a President, a poem which has become a manifesto on difference.
Acknowledgements
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Flor Braier (Buenos Aires, 1979) is a literary translator, poet and composer. She has published the books Bambalinas (Editorial Vinciguerra, 2008) and Los nombres propios (Editorial Caleta Olivia, 2018), and, as a soloist, has released Pony Feelings, Río, Nit and Duermen los animales, as well as translating work by Diane di Prima, Chris Kraus and Eileen Myles, among other authors.
Eileen Myles (Cambridge, 1949) is a poet and novelist. They have published almost twenty volumes of poetry and prose, most notably Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991); Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Press, 1994); Cool for You (Soft Skull, 2000); Skies (Black Sparrow Press, 2001); Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007); The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Semiotext(e), 2009); Inferno: A Poet's Novel (OR Books, 2010); I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (HarperCollins, 2016); Afterglow: A Dog Memoir (Grove Press, 2017); and Evolution (Grove Press, 2018). They have also directed The Poetry Project, a key centre of experimental poetry in New York, and have been honoured with a Guggenheim fellowship, a Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, four Lambda Literary Awards and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, among others.
Nerea Pérez de las Heras (Madrid, 1982) is a journalist and communicator. She is behind the project Feminismo para torpes (2016–2019), which takes the form of a book, a theatre monologue and a series of videos. She also directs and presents the podcasts Saldremos mejores (Podium Podcast), with Inés Hernand, and Lo normal (Cadena Ser), with Antonio Nuño, and has been honoured with the Reconocimiento Arcoíris, awarded by Spain’s Ministry of Equality, for her activism in enhancing the visibility of lesbian and trans-inclusive feminism.
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.
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.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.