The Feminisms Container

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.