Graphic Action Art, Revolt and Anti-Fascism
International Encounter on Graphic Turn
Held on 18 May 2022
This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties.
The encounter pools different graphic action art tools and tactics from the street — understanding graphic art in an expanded sense, or more aptly as a burst — with initiatives ranging from collective sewing to cartography. The programme comprises tables to debate themes which intensify the curatorial concepts of the show and create a transversal composition among artists, curators, researchers and activists with a view to sharing different graphic art tools and strategies of dissemination and occupying streets.
A dialogue that seeks to find not only coincidences and affinities between historical cycles and the present day, but also tensions and latencies. Graphic art — like the ivy in the chorus of the well-known song “Volver a los diecisiete” (Being Seventeen Again), by Chilean singer-songwriter Violeta Parra — grows on walls and sprouts over and over. Just like life.
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Clara Albinati (Brazil) is a professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, and is a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network. She works as a researcher and independent film-maker.
Sebastián Alonso Bessonart (Uruguay) is a professor at the University of the Republic, in Montevideo, Uruguay. Focusing on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, he coordinates the CasaMario Project and has participated in numerous biennials and international exhibitions.
Carolina Barrero (Cuba) is an art historian, curator and activist. She has worked in different institutions and art galleries and has promoted actions of civic and peaceful resistance linked to the 27N group and San Isidro Movement.
Edén Bastida (Mexico) is a visual artist who holds a PhD in Art Theory and History from the University of Buenos Aires, with his research on underground Zapatista film-making noteworthy.
Gonzalo Castro-Colimil (Chile) is an artist and cultural agitator. He founded the Coordinator of Artistic Operations (COA) and is director of the ËFA Txawün residency and circuit of territorial experience.
Javier del Olmo (Argentina) is an architect and multidisciplinary artist. He is a co-founding member of the art-action collectives XI Ventanas (1996–2003), Mínimo9 (2000–2003), Arde! (2001–2012) and Artistas Solidarios (2013–2018).
David Feldman (USA) is a film-maker, editor and photographer. His works most notably include the documentary Los Olvidados. The Forgotten (2014) on the installation of Jay Lynn Gómez’s mural paying homage to migrants who have died attempting to cross the Mexican-US border.
Hugo Giménez (Paraguay) is a film-maker. He was awarded the IV DOCTV Latinoamérica Prize for Fuera de campo, and his film Matar a un muerto (Killing the Dead) was Paraguay’s nomination for the Goya Awards and Oscars in 2021, the same year he was also nominated for best Ibero-American fictional debut feature in the Platino Awards.
Sol Henaro (Mexico) is a researcher and curator. Her specialist field is the critical historiography of artistic practices from 1980 to the present day. Since 2010, she has been part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and since 2015 she has curated Acervo Documental and overseen the Arkheia Documentation Centre at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico.
Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (Venezuela) is the director of Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, in El Salvador. He is also the founder of Radio Venceremo and has curated exhibitions on historical memory, culture and identity. He was awarded the International Prince Claus Award for Culture and Development.
Cristina Híjar (Mexico) is a professor in the fields of communication and politics and a visual arts researcher. She is part of the work group Art and Politics from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the Híjar Collective, which focuses on aesthetic-political actions for historical memory.
Natalia Iguiñiz Boggio (Peru) is a visual artist, university lecturer, feminist activist and mum. Her work explores the construction of discourses around conceptions of women, sexuality, domestic work and maternity, as well as historical memory and the coloniality of power.
Ana Longoni (Argentina) is a writer and researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), where she explores the crossroads between art and politics in Latin America. She has also propelled the Southern Conceptualisms Network since it was founded, and from 2018 to 2021 she was director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Jay Lynn Gómez (USA) is an artist. Her work focuses on giving a voice to the migrant community in California and revealing their working conditions. Her work has been exhibited at institutions that include the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.) and the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA, Long Beach, California).
André Mesquita (Brazil) is a researcher who holds a PhD in Social History. He investigates the articulations between art, politics and activism, and is also a curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network.
Fernando Miranda (Uruguay) is a professor and researcher at the University of the Republic, in Montevideo, Uruguay. He currently coordinates the Research Nucleus of Visual Culture, Education and Identity Construction in the Fine Arts Institute at the same university.
Guillermina Mongan (Argentina) is an art historian, teacher, researcher, curator and artist. She is a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, the collective Frente Sudaka, Serigrafistas Queer— where she also coordinates its ASK archive — and Cromoactivismo.
Alberto Nanclares (Spain) is a visual artist, urban activist, architect and DJ. He was among those driving forward the Graphic Liberation of Madrid Movement and, since 2001, has been a founding member of the Basurama collective.
Yanelys Núñez Leyva (Cuba) is a curator and feminist activist. She is a member of the San Isidro Movement and co-founder of the Museo de la Disidencia en Cuba (MDC) cultural platform.
Elva Peniche Monfort (Mexico) is a researcher, teacher, curator and archive manager. Her interests encompass the crossroads between archive, photography and Latin American artistic practices in the second half of the twentieth century.
Juan Pablo Pérez (Argentina) is a teacher, artist and curator. He coordinates the Department of Visual Ideas from the “Floreal Gorini” Cultural Centre of Cooperation, is part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and participated in the archive-show Resistencias Tipográficas.
Suset Sánchez Sánchez (Cuba) is a curator, art critic and researcher. She has been a research fellow in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Exhibitions Department and Spain’s Royal Academy in Rome, as well as curating the Intermediæ programme of activities in Matadero Madrid.
Mariela Scafati (Argentina) is an artist. Her work experiments with Geometric Abstraction, modern design, performance and alternative media. She is a member of Serigrafistas Queer and Cromoactivismo, and her shows most notably include ¡Teléfono! En diálogo con Lidy Prati (Centro Cultural Borges, 2009) and Handcuff Secrets (Floating Island stand at Art Basel Miami, 2017).
Sylvia Suárez (Colombia) is a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, and a curator and art historian. She is a member of the Taller Historia Crítica del Arte (Critical History of Art Workshop) research group and the Southern Conceptualisms Network.
Mabel Tapia (Argentina) is deputy artistic director of Museo Reina Sofía.
Todo por la praxis is an artistic collective made up of visual artist, researcher and educator Jo Muñoz (Chile) and architect and artist Diego Peris López (Spain). Its concerns spotlight dissidences as political forms of resistance which are able to build other possible imaginaries.
César Valencia (Chile) is a visual artist. He was previously a member of the Piñen collective, Illicit Association (2010–2018) and develops the Medicinal and Emotional Graphic Production graphic archive.
Paulina E. Varas (Chile) is an academic and associate researcher at the Andrés Bello University in Santiago de Chile. She is currently developing the project Art, Politics and Women from Chile, a genealogy of/for/with the social and subjective body, with support from the Chilean National Agency of Research and Development.
Hugo Vidal (Argentina) is a visual artist. His works centred on political art and activism have been included in projects such as the 8th Meeting of European and Latin American Museums. Retracing Networks (Museo Reina Sofía and ARCOmadrid, 2019) and the archive-show Resistencias Tipográficas (“Floreal Gorini” Cultural Centre of Cooperation 2015).
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Programme
Wednesday, 18 May 2022
10:30am Presentation
—Conducted by Ana Longoni and Mabel Tapia, with a video intervention by the La Voz de la Mujer Graphic Art Collective
11am – 2pm Untimely Memories
Round-table discussion
Speaking of memories inside the framework of graphic art practice points to a genealogy of the relationship between art and politics, comprising graphic action art hailing from divergent eras and places. The untimely can be understood as that which bursts forth in time to subvert the order of life, and certain graphic actions can be taken as signs of an inverted or dislocated temporality. In an untimely fashion, they strike up a dialogue between experiences and knowledge, creating new relationships and meanings between the present, past echoes and impulses towards the future.
Coordinated by: Sol Henaro
Participants: Sebastián Alonso Bessonart, Hugo Giménez, Cristina Híjar, Fernando Miranda, Alberto Nanclares and Juan Pablo Pérez
4:30pm - 6:30pm Graphic Action Art: From Revolution to Repression
Round-table discussion
Intellectuals’ relationships with politics and their active participation in collective processes to transform social reality through revolutionary channels have historically led to a field of tensions: from enthusiasm, solidarity and militant commitment to subsequent disillusion before the persecution and repression of critical thought by the State and the exercise of political violence on bodies, all of which is reflected in symbolic production. These are cyclical disputes in Latin American history that have occurred since the Cuban Revolution. This round-table discussion ignites dialogue between the oscillating and complex place of graphic action art in Cuba and Nicaragua.
Coordinated by: Suset Sánchez Sánchez
Participants: Carolina Barrero and Yanelys Núñez Leyva
6:30 - 8:30pm Neither True Nor False
Performance and Conversation
Since 2013, Argentinian artist and activist Mariela Scafati has been performing Neither True Nor False, putting forward an exercise of memory which revisits the past twenty years of her committed practice in serigraph activism, in which she has driven collective initiatives such as the Taller Popular de Serigrafía and Serigrafistas Queer. After the performance, Scafati will discuss this journey (and the poetic operations invoking it) with artist and curator Guillermina Mongan, who has supported and written about the action.
Participants: Guillermina Mongan and Mariela Scafati
Thursday, 19 May 2022
11am – 2pm Graphic Bodies: Stencils for Street Choreography
Round-table discussion
Street-based graphic art practices cannot be considered externally from the bodies printing and bearing them. There is little more fragile than a card stencil that will be used repeatedly to paint a wall, surface, T-shirt or skin as a support to multiply its image. Graphic bodies trace their polyphonic and talking chorography in the streets.
Coordinated by: Sylvia Suárez
Participants: Clara Albinati, Gonzalo Castro-Colimil, Elva Peniche Monfort and Paulina E. Varas
4pm – 6:30pm Border-crossings: Collective Practices and Reinventing the Political
Round-table discussion
The notion of cross-border graphic art refers to the knowledge and bodies of resistance that cross borders (geopolitical frontiers and borders between knowledge) with the disobedience of successive steps and the power of collective walking, weaving alliances, tackling precariousness in life and tacking disobedient memories under an open sky.
Coordinated by: André Mesquita
Participants: Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, Todo por la praxis collective, Javier del Olmo and César Valencia
7pm – 9pm Anti-fascist Graphic Activism in the Present
Assembly
This forum of assembly seeks dialogue between different contemporary experiences of anti-fascist and anti-patriarchal graphic art and art-making (visual and performance) in public spaces that face an increasingly more excluding and violent order. Via short interventions by six activist artists from different contexts, a space is created to share experiences between researchers, artists and activists participating in the collective project Graphic Turn — and between different local and Latin American collectives and activists — to imagine modes of sharing knowledge and weaving collaboration networks.
Coordinated by: Ana Longoni
Participants: Eden Bastida, David Feldman, Natalia Iguiñiz Boggio, Jay Lynn Gómez and Hugo Vidal
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Red Conceptualismos del Sur
Collaboration
Mexican Embassy in Spain, Cultural Diplomacy of Mexico, the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain and hablarenarte
With the support of
Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (Proyecto Fondecyt/ANID nº 11201004)
En el marco de
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 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.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo
Tuesday, 10 February 2026 – 7pm
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo, Fernando Davis, the show’s curator, and Amanda de la Garza, the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artist director, will converse in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400 on the life and work of the Argentinian artist, a core figure in experimental avant-garde art.
The title of both exhibition and conversation originates from the proclamation “Long Live Arte Vivo” Alberto Greco (Buenos Aires, 1931— Barcelona, 1965) disseminated around the streets and on the walls of Rome. For Greco, arte vivo was an art of the future, an art based on a set of irreverent and untimely gestures, of adventures open to unpredictability melding with life, and which began in 1962, prior to his coining of the term “vivo-dito”. In his Manifiesto dito dell´arte vivo (Dito Arte-Vivo Manifesto), which he pasted on the walls of Genoa, Greco encouraged new contact “with the living elements of our reality: movement, time, people, conversations, smells, rumours, places, situations”. He would also burst into the everyday of Madrid’s streets as he convened a “vivo-dito moment”, culminating in the burning of a canvas painted collectively in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.
In addition to founding arte vivo, Alberto Greco was an informalist painter, a queer flâneur, a poet and sometime actor. This intense journey of Greco’s life and art is closely connected to the migrant route he embarked upon in 1950 in Buenos Aires, taking in Atacama and Humahuaca, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Genoa, Rome, Madrid, Piedralaves, New York and Ibiza and ending abruptly in Barcelona, where he took his own life shortly after writing his final great work, the novel Besos brujos (Bewitching Kisses, 1965).
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.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
“This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call ‛aestheticide’ — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?”
—T.J. DemosThis seminar takes place thanks to the art historian’s invitation to Spain by the Miró Foundation. In the context of the museum, it engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.