Held on 26 may 2021
Spanish factories where women from Tangiers work. Spanish tourists in beachfront hotels in Martil (Tetouan). Moroccan women picking strawberries in Huelva. Lives that take place here and there, a continual transit of people, capital, histories and powers through this narrow strait. Yet, in relation to social movements, in particular feminism and its capacity to contribute significantly to ways of understanding, caring and organising, there are scant connections between one territory and another.
In February 2020, Hanan Dalouh Amghar and Maggie Schmitt embarked on a research trip through northern Morocco with a view to establishing contact and engaging in dialogue with collectives and women who are active in feminist struggles. The research stems from three key questions: Which feminist and/or women’s collectives are active there today? Which practices, debates and challenges are contemplated among these groups and what is the relationship with Moroccan reality? Which connections and alliances can be established with the active feminisms here?
In this encounter, the two researchers and three activists from northern Morocco they met on their trip will discuss the situation of the feminist movement in the context of present-day Morocco, exploring issues, leading figures, disputes and challenges and placing the stress on the diversity of initiatives, priorities and practices, and on the different realities of country and city, centre and periphery.
The encounter seeks to cast light on the legacy of women’s struggles in Morocco through the conquest of rights — both individual and collective — and always from a gaze of mutual understanding that looks to serve at once as an alliance and impetus to weave together networks.
Co-occurring with this activity is the organisation of a session designed specifically for Moroccan women comprising the Open Classroom for Women in the Rivas-Vaciamadrid Council’s Department of Feminisms and Diversity. With Hanan Dalouh and Zohra Koubia, a conversation is put forward on the aforementioned issues and ends with a visit to the Museo and the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020.
Hanan Dalouh Amghar is an intercultural social mediator, translator and interpreter, and an activist who defends human rights with a commitment to feminisms.
Souad Eddouada is a lecturer at Université Ibn Tofail in Kenitra, Morocco. Her work is focused on the feminist movement and human rights. In recent years, she has joined the struggle of farming communities for access to land, with a particular emphasis on the prominent role of women and neoliberal dynamics.
Zohra Koubia is part of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH) and founder and president of the Association Forum des Femmes Au Rif (AFFA RIF).
Nadia Naïr is a lecturer at Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi, Tangiers-Tetouan, and an activist and member of the Union of Feminist Action, Morocco. She specialises in gender and human rights issues and is the author of a wide range of articles on women’s advocacy in Morocco and Muslim emigration in Europe.
Maggie Schmitt is a translator who works in different media to intertwine networks and discourse around feminisms, agri-food cultures and the relationship between lives and places.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and La Laboratoria. Feminist Research Spaces
Collaboration
The Open Classroom for Women in the Rivas-Vaciamadrid Council’s Department of Feminisms and Diversity
Inside the framework of
Participants
Participants
![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
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
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.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.