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
![Isabel Coixet, 100 Years and You Everywhere [100 años y tú en todos los sitios], 2026, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/2.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
John Berger and Isabel Coixet. Continued Ways of Seeing
Thursday, 17 September 2026 at 7pm
Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.
The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.
![Chantal Akerman, Woman Sitting after Killing [Mujer sentada después de matar], 2001, instalación. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/chantal-akerman-mujer-sentada-despues-matar.jpg.webp)
On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge
18, 19 SEP 2026
The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.
In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art.
Godard and Miéville: Time and Ruin
Friday, 18 September 2026 - 7pm
Inside the framework of the conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge, this film series sets forth three critical visions of the museum via three sessions featuring the works of John Berger, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ariella Azoulay, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker, Kwate Nee-Owoo, and the premiere of short films by Isabel Coixet and La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado). In classical theory, the museum gives the world meaning; it contains fragments of the past, granting them a history, a narrative that explains preterite time and the present. Today, there is an implicit assumption that this function hides and legitimises forms of power, yet what if the museum, instead of explaining the world, multiplied it through radical ideas, silenced periods and repressed subjects? Such is the approach of the film-makers and artists in this film season.
In 1972 the writer John Berger opened the landmark television series Ways of Seeing with an iconoclastic gesture: slicing Sandro Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars (1485) in London’s National Gallery. A transgressive act that recalls contemporary attacks on the museum by dissident youth and with which Berger, after revealing it was a reproduction, sought to ignite debate around the idea of an original artwork and a copy. In this, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first session pays homage to one of the great art writers of the twentieth century. Starting with a review of Berger’s audiovisual work by art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola, the series begins with the premiere of 100 Years and You Everywhere (2026), an unreleased short film by Isabel Coixet composed as a beautifully crafted letter to Berger, and continues with an analysis of fragments of Ways of Seeing in relation to the museum and contemporary art.
The second session screens two medium-length films by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville on time, ruin and museum. In The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century (1999), both film-makers consider what remains of that “old place”, the museum, at the close of a century of wars and totalitarianism, and ask whether it should be more of a legend or desire than a place. This same driving principle leads Godard to build his own imaginary museum in Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006), a rickety toy museum which, paradoxically, contains the great film-maker’s full power of thought on history and images.
Finally, the third session explores one of the major challenges of recent years: the decolonisation of the museum, the recognition of its link to imperialist discourses of power and the need to situate a new silenced or repressed subject at the centre of the Western narration of history. Under the title Museums and Restitution, it includes the film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), by theorist Ariella Azoulay, Statues Also Die, by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker (1953), Kwate Nee-Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and the first screening of the short film Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), by La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado), filmed at the Museo de América in Madrid.
![Ariella Azoulay, Un-documented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder [Indocumentados. Desaprendiendo el saqueo imperial], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/5.diseminar-mundo.jpg.webp)
Museums and Restitution
Saturday, 19 September 2026 - 7pm
Centuries of plundering, decades of amnesia, years of living with unmitigated extractivist power… Does a museum, as we know it, have a raison d'être in a postcolonial society?
This session expounds the operations of the museum as a colonial machine, while putting forward ideas, in narration, for a more just, equal and inclusive institution of the future via society’s marginalised and minority voices. The session begins with the international premiere of Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), which presents a vision of the Quimbaya Collection (fifth and sixth centuries CE) from the Museo de América in Madrid. It is constructed with the voices and chants of Wayúu mourners and guides, not only as a way of reinstating the role of these gold idols — anthropomorphic figures of men and women used as vessels in ritual practices — but also to imagine that what must be exhibited is not the gold itself. It is the ritual’s own chant. In the classic film You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian film-maker Kwate Nee-Owoo accesses the British Museum’s collection of African art, located in the building’s basement, to question the meaning behind a museum plundering and nullifying. A fine exercise of first-person institutional critique screened for the first time in Spain. Almost seventy years since Resnais and Marker made Statues Also Die (1953), a reflection on the aura-bearing value of the museum opposite the identity-based and cultural belonging of African art, theorist Ariella Azoulay films the same statues again at the Musée du Trocadéro (today the Musée du Quai Branly), which survive and wait to be reunited with their people. Azoulay, whose wholly original undertaking is a lesson to the museum of the future, connects the forced migration of these sculptures with the mass transit of people crossing borders artificially imposed by the same system that has plundered their culture.
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation
From 21 to 24 September 2026
The School of Transformative Institutionalism and Local Organisation (S.T.I.L.O.) is a programme of joint learning and join strategy which sets in motion a process for the exchange of questions, methodologies and experiences between cultural organisations. The overall aim is to create, circulate and prototype tactics, tools and collective knowledge on institutional practices that open new channels for defending culture and advocating structural transformation in divergent geographical contexts.
The project is part of the Laboratorio de Institucionalidad Compartida (The Laboratory of Shared Institutionalism, LIC), a space for the Museo Reina Sofía’s research, work and advocacy centred on developing, experimenting with and systemising practices, protocols and tools which contribute to a fairer and more liveable cultural ecosystem.
For many years now, so-called infrastructural critique in museums questions material, legal and economic infrastructures, among others, as well as the forms of solidarity and practices required to sustain the cultural ecosystem. By approaching current debates, S.T.I.L.O. raises questions on the ways in which organisations define and interpret their practices, organise their relations and respond to the social contexts in which they operate.
The school gathers four cultural organisations that work via different institutional models – scale, contexts, conditions, different working models — with the goal of pooling common strategies and tools of organisation, advocacy and relationships with local communities.
The programme is conceived as a collaborative process with the participation of Arika, La Revuelta, BAK Basecamp and The Tentacular Museum (Museo Reina Sofía) and is structured around preparatory online sessions and an in-person seminar in Madrid.
S.T.I.L.O. is an activity framed inside the working strand of Situated Organisations from L'Internationale’s Museum of the Commons project, which reflects on the role of museums and art organisations as actors within complex social networks and ecosystems, with a view to exploring new ways to democratise institutions and make them more open, inclusive and useful.