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21 September 2020 – 4pm
Session 1
“Chile Woke Up!”: The Complexities of Progression Interrupted by the Pandemic
In the wake of more than thirty years of democratic transition which left issues around social rights, memory and justice outstanding, the social unrest in October 2019 led citizens to scream: “Chile Woke Up!”. It did so by challenging the neoliberal order and imagining new horizons of social transformation.
This first session in the seminar prompts a review of the trance brought on by passing from the desire to re-establish a new democracy to the feeling of a future closed off by the uncertainty and misery of a fear-infected present. This fact alters the configurations of memory, the sensitive weft of bodies and human lives, ways of conceiving society and politics in its articulations with the State, and so on.
The pandemic has left the world hanging and withdrawn, its effects a reason to rethink new formulations and consider new ways of acting that give rise to solidarity practices which are able to regenerate intersubjective ties.
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Monday, 28 September 2020 – 4pm
Session 2
Art in Times of Emergency
Over the past few decades, a far-reaching debate has been set out around the critical role of art and the capacity of artistic practices to question the relationship between social structures and power correlations, putting forward alternatives that defy the regime of signs set by capitalist rule. Art’s critical signs help us to take note of the effects of the symbolic closure exercised by the different systems of violence and political, economic and social control; as an emancipatory response, art invites a broadening of the limits of perception and consciousness that define the contours of a reality in conflict.
The seminar’s second session seeks to reflect on the artistic manifestations that, between social uprisings and the pandemic, put their strategies of ethical-political intervention to the test in a present besieged by multiple forms. To reflect on the dialogue and counterpoint between different strategies of artistic activism which concern memory, the action Not to Die of Hunger in Art, by the CADA collective (1979), and the intervention carried out by Delight Lab (2020), involving the projection of the word “Hambre (Hunger)” on the tallest building in Santiago de Chile in the middle of lockdown, will both be analysed.
Imaginaries of Revolt, Archive of Life, and Experience Reshaped from the Pandemic
Online seminar conducted by Nelly Richard
Held on 21 Sep 2020
Recent times have witnessed an outbreak of diverse social uprisings on a global scale (Hong King, Barcelona, Quito, Beirut, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile) to protest against the regime of inequality and social injustice established by neoliberal hegemony. The balance of the success or failure of these multiple attempts to obstruct the neoliberal system are yet to be gauged due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19, which has forced the entire planet to halt its rhythms and flows, bringing it to a near complete standstill.
In Chile, the uprising sparked in October 2019 unleashed an encouraging process shaped by the call for a Constituent Assembly, before the pandemic slowed its core drives right down. The result was a shift from mobilised collective energies to deserted cities and bodies stranded in the individual isolation of lockdown. This forced step, moving from the beat of something new to an unforeseen lack of motion, has led to questions related to how to reinterpret the archive of revolts — in Chile and other zones — considering the emotions and shocks the pandemic has etched into bodies to extract reserves of meaning from them and which orbit around instability.
Curator:
Nelly Richard
Force line:
Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the Banco Santander Foundation
Participants
Nelly Richard is a theorist and essayist, and was founder and director of Revista de Crítica Cultural from 1990 to 2008 and director of the MA in Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Social Sciences (ARCIS) in Santiago (Chile) from 2006 to 2013. She has written a broad number of publications in Chile and internationally in relation to art, memory and the Chilean transition to democracy, for instance: Márgenes e Instituciones. Arte en Chile desde 1973 (Metales pesados, 1986, reissued in 2008); Masculino / Femenino. Prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática (Francisco Zegers Editor, 1993); La Insubordinación de los Signos (cambio político, transformaciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis) [conversación entre: Germán Bravo, Martín Hopenhayn, Nelly Richard, Adriana Valdés] (Cuarto Propio, 1994); Residuos y metáforas. Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Cuarto propio, 1998); Fracturas de la memoria. Arte y pensamiento crítico (Siglo veintiuno, 2007); Feminismo, género y diferencia(s) (Palinodia, 2008); Crítica de la memoria (Universidad Diego Portales, 2010); Crítica y política (Palinodia, 2013) and Diálogos latinoamericanos en las fronteras del arte (Ediciones udp, 2014). Furthermore, she curated the Chilean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, under the title Poetics of Dissent: Paz Errázuriz — Lotty Rosenfeld. Since 2019, she has coordinated the force line Politics and Aesthetics of Memory, inside the framework of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.