Held on 26 Mar 2022
The Contenedor de feminismos (Feminisms Container) is a sculpture and mobile archive devised and activated by artist Carme Nogueira and researchers Anxela Caramés and Uqui Permui and as a part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. Designed to be used in public space, it seeks to recover, document and make visible the history of women, feminisms and struggles in this sphere.
Since 2009, different “docu-actions” — a term employed to designate an encounter or dialogue between women, on a specific theme, in public space — have been carried out, rescuing memory between the public and the private. Thus, the docu-action conducted in the Museo revolves around feminism and associationist syndicalism, starting from a key document in the history of the Container: a video of the closure of the Odosa cannery reflecting women’s experiences in the factory. The makers of the film also discovered the first women’s trade union, registered at the end of the 1980s, under the name OTTS (The Organisation of Female and Male Workers of Salnés), helping women workers to organise beyond the factory walls. The action will end with four women sharing their experiences of different labour and culture sectors — as well as the audience wishing to participate — to recover practices from the syndicalist world and to discover new forms of syndicalism, associationism and labour struggles developed under the umbrella of feminism. The materials created from this docu-action will be incorporated into the Container to form part of its archive.
Tensi Álvarez is a feminist activist in charge of the Secretariat for Equality at the Regional Union of Workers’ Commissions of A Coruña. She has actively participated in forming the feminist movement in Galicia from the Asociación Galega da Muller (The Galician Women’s Association, AGM), as well as in building syndicalism from this sphere through different positions, both inside the State Civil Service and from the union of Workers’ Commissions (CCOO). Moreover, she has been affiliated with the Galician Feminist Platform in A Coruña, working alongside other feminist organisations in 8M demonstrations.
Anxela Caramés is an art and feminisms researcher, curator, art critic and cultural producer. Her activities around contemporary art focus on issues related to gender studies, the ramifications of the social and the political, and art emerging from processes of creation, production, management, reflection and dissemination. Her projects include Seoanes Posibles. After Teresa de Villar (Fundación Luis Seoane, 2013), Miradas de mujer sobre la Guía Postal de Lugo de Maruja Mallo (Museo Provincial de Lugo, 2014) and Lost & Found. Archivos (Re)colectados (NORMAL Espazo de intervención cultural, 2014). As a co-founder, she has been involved in the Contenedor de feminismos project since 2008.
Maribel Doménech is an artist and lecturer in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts from the Valencia Polytechnic University. Her lines of research incorporate art, textile fabrics and technology to reflect on the intimate and the social in daily life via interdisciplinary installations. She has also been a member of the Laboratorio de Luz Research Group since 1990. Her works can be found in museums and collections in the Netherlands, Chile and Spain, and notable among her solo shows is Acciones cotidianas ([Daily Actions], Centre del Carme. Cultura Contemporània, 2020). She is also a member of Mujeres en las Artes Visuales (Women in Visual Arts, MAV).
Marta Echaves is a researcher and writer. Her projects are developed at the intersection of curatorial practice, writing and historiographic research, and she sets out to revisit images and metaphors associated with specific temporal contexts, from intimate lived experiences and anecdotes as detonating devices of poetics of memory. This is placed at the centre of work with oral memory and intimate archives, and the violence and loss intersecting them, in addition to demonstrating the need to rely upon practices and rituals of restitution and collective mourning. At present, she designs activities for the publisher Caja Negra and is a coordinator of Contar es escuchar (Telling Is Listening), an art research course in La Casa Encendida (Madrid).
Carme Nogueira is a visual artist whose work is aligned towards the overlapping of the public and the private via contextual practices. At the present time, she reflects on processes of subjectivation and the normalising role of spaces through photography and installation — in her most recent works, this issue materialises in a series of objects and actions for public space. Her most recent exhibition projects include Vida Hurdana. Lo que escriben los niños (Lalín Pintor Laxeiro Biennial, Museo Municipal Ramón María Aller, 2017), El Contrato (Alhóndiga Bilbao, 2014) and Múltiplos de 100 (Instituto de la Cultura y las Artes de Sevilla - ICAS, 2014). As a co-founder, she has been involved in the Contenedor de feminismos project since 2008.
Uqui Permui is an art director and graphic designer who works in the field of communication, design and audiovisuals, with a particular interest in the flows and dynamics of public space. Her most recent projects include the publication From Spain with Design ¿Refleja la imagen de España lo que diseñamos? promoted from the Spanish Network of Design Associations (Experimenta, 2020), the campaign En Negro Contra as Violencias (2015–2019) and the redesign of the brand Xacobeo 2021. As a co-founder, she has been involved in the Contenedor de feminismos project since 2008.
Territorio Doméstico is a group of female domestic workers living in the Community of Madrid which, since 2006, has been organised to call for the recognition of their rights as workers, defining their contribution to society through the direct link to care. Their main vindications pivot around the recognition of rights for domestic workers, and the worth of care work in a system that devalues it and makes it invisible and precarious despite being essential to upholding life. In 2019, they released the record Sin nosotras se para el mundo (Without Women the World Stops), a compilation of songs that give a voice to the situation these female workers face, and in 2020 they made Querían brazos y llegamos personas (They Wanted Arms But People Arrived), a radio drama and play on migration and domestic work.
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Files of Tropical Revolutions
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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.
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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.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.