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

Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.

Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.

International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.

Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.

Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.
