Fiercely Human. Cultural Studies about the 40's

Santos Yubero, Martín. Exhibición deportiva en Ciudad Universitaria. Photography b/w, s/f.
Held on 10, 17, 24, 31 may, 07, 14 jun 2016
The period of autocracy in Spain presents itself as an abominable decade characterised by the triumphant Francoist aesthetic and ideology on all fronts. This series of lectures, in conjunction with the exhibition Campo Cerrado. Spanish Art 1939–1953, debates and calls into question this acknowledgement through the views of six historians and theorists hailing from different fields of study and different generations. The multi-faceted approach to a contradictory and tumultuous time enables the recovery and analysis of silent formations of cultural dissidence, the reality of external and internal exile, popular forms as a space of play and transgression, the notion of sacrifice in painting, and the persisting nostalgia and wounds in literary texts. The title of the series borrows its name from Fiercely Human Angel, Blas de Otero’s book of poems, which, along with Children of Wrath by Dámaso Alonso, characterises this decade as a period of survival and rawness in equal measure.
The series’ full programme will be presented in the coming days.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Ongoing recognition of credits with the Complutense, Carlos III and Autónoma Universities of Madrid.
Participants
Mari Paz Balibrea is a professor of cultural studies in the Department of Cultures and Languages Birkbeck at the University of London. Her publications include En la tierra baldía. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y la izquierda española en la postmodernidad (El Viejo Topo, 1999) and Tiempo de exilio. Una mirada crítica a la modernidad española desde el pensamiento republicano en el exilio (Montesinos, 2007). She is the coordinator, co-editor and co-author of the project Líneas de fuga. Hacia otra historiografía del exilio cultural republicano español (Akal, 2017), and is currently co-editing the collective book María Zambrano Amongst the Philosophers: A Reconsideration.
Laurence Bertrand-Dorleac is a professor of art history at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). She is also the author of publications such as Histoire de l’art. Paris 1940-1944 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986), Art of the Defeat. France 1940–1944 (Getty Research Institute, 2008), L'ordre sauvage. Violence, dépense et sacré dans l'art des années 1950-1960 (Gallimard, 2004) and Après la guerre (Gallimard, 2010), among others. Furthermore, she has jointly curated the exhibition L’art en guerre, France 1938-1947 (Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012 and Guggenheim de Bilbao, 2013) and curated Les désastres de la guerre. 1800-2014 (Louvre-Lens, 2014).
Jordi Gracia is a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona. His publications include Estado y cultura. El despertar de una conciencia crítica (Anagrama, 1996), La resistencia silenciosa (Anagrama, 2004) and A la intemperie. Exilio y cultura en España (Anagrama, 2010). He is also the author of La vida rescatada de Dionisio Ridruejo (Anagrama, 2008) and co-author, together with Domingo Ródenas, of the literary history Derrota y restitución de la modernidad: 1939-2010 (Crítica, 2011). His latest book is the cultural biography José Ortega y Gasset (Taurus, 2014).
Jo Labanyi is a professor of Spanish literature and culture at New York University. She is a specialist in cultural studies and cultural history in modern Spain, and her recent publications are made up of Spanish Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010) and A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Blackwell, 2015), edited alongside Tatjana Pavlovic. Furthermore, she is co-author of A Cultural History of Modern Spanish Literature and Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain: An Oral History (both books are forthcoming), and she is writing a monographic study on Spanish cinema between the years 1939 and 1953, provisionally entitled Reading Cinema under Dictatorship. She is also the founder and director of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.
Germán Labrador Méndez is a professor of literature and cultural history at the University of Princeton. He has written two books on the study of counterculture movements and activism in 1970s literature, entitled Letras arrebatadas, Poesía y química en la transición española (Devenir, 2009) and Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968-1984) [forthcoming]. At the present time he is conducting investigations into the ephemeral productions and forms of political resistance that have recently taken place in Spain, in a project provisionally entitled Luces efímeras. La lógica cultural de la crisis española.
Jesusa Vega is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Iberian & Latin American Studies, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, and held the King Juan Carlos I Chair of Spanish Culture at New York University in 2011. She is currently lead researcher in the project La Historia del Arte en España: devenir, discursos y propuestas. In addition to visual culture from the 18th and 19th centuries, she has also written about the history and methodology of art history, most notably in the publication El descubrimiento del arte español. Cossío, Lafuente, Gaya Nuño (Novatores, 2008), together with Javier Portús, and in the articles “Del pasado al futuro de la Historia del Arte en la Universidad Española” (Ars Longa. Cuadernos de Arte, 2007) and “Points de repère pour l'histoire de l'art en Espagne” (Perspective, 2009).


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.

Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).

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.

The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.

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.




![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)