These sessions explore different formats with which artistic tools enable other possible worlds to be imagined: mapping networks of activism, drawing up manifestos, creating spaces of assembly in the framework of art and developing collective dramaturgies as modes of investigating the present. Researchers, artists and activists from the Institute of Radical Imagination will share their experiences on artistic platforms as strategies of subjectivation and political action in the projects Art for UBI (Universal Basic Income) and Art for Radical Ecologies, in addition to studying the approach to radical pedagogies via projects such as The School of Emergencies, Kirik and Raising Care. Finally, the Centro Revolucionario de Arqueología Social (Revolutionary Centre of Social Archaeology, CRAS), alongside the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), will raise issues around the situation of CSA La Tabacalera in Lavapiés after thirteen years of free culture and self-management.
![Maja Bajevic, Arts, Crafts and Facts (Top 10%, 90%) [Artes, artesanías y datos (Ricos 10%, 90%)], 1967. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/nim.jpg.webp)
Held on 20, 21 Apr, 25, 26 May, 05, 06 Jul 2023
Inside the framework of the Critical Node Militant Research, from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue, the Foundation of the Commons, the Institute of Radical Imagination and La Laboratoria, in collaboration with the Museo en Red team, put forward a space of training and study on the specificity of forms of militant research. Situated outside academic frameworks, these investigations pick up the legacy of workers’ co-research from the 1960s, feminist epistemologies and theories of research-action. Therefore, more than establishing a method, they seek to generate devices in order for social struggles to read each other and find causes that lead to action.
This Critical Node looks to reflect on (and from) tools and learnings from networks with which the Museo has been collaborating over the past fifteen years, in relation to those processes of knowledge production which ultimately aim not to interpret the world but to organise its transformation.
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The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a Mediterranean-wide network founded in 2017 by artists, activists, academics and cultural producers with a shared interest in co-producing knowledge, artistic and political research and interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist ways of life. With the vocation of joining art, activism and pedagogy, the IRI emerges as a post-capitalist institution — a "quasi-institution" — which operates as an interface between diverse spaces and agents, causing mutual contamination between academic institutions, museums and self-managed social centres.
La Laboratoria. Spaces of Feminist Research is a transnational device of feminist activist research, that which is developed by those involved in different territories, involved in specific conflicts and struggles, with different yet common languages and questions. The research applies the lens of feminist contempt to diverse processes, flowing beyond any drawer or pigeonhole of so-called "women’s" issues. With participation from four cities — Buenos Aires, Quito, New York and Madrid — La Laboratoria promotes activist research inside the feminist tide as situated theoretical practice allowing maps of position and analysis to be constructed collectively.
Foundation of the Commons is a laboratory of discourse and political action, entangling a series of research, publishing, training and bookshop groups that pool resources to drive the development of critical culture and social democratisation. The structure of the network is made up of social and research spaces (La Casa Invisible, Ateneo La Maliciosa, Traficantes de Sueños, IDRA, Ateneu Candela, Synusia and Katakrak) from different corners of the Iberian Peninsula (Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Terrassa, Iruñea-Pamplona).
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Organised by
Inside the framework of
Connective Tissue. The Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme: Critical Node, Militant Research
Participants
Participants
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Thursday, 20 April 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Session 1
6pm Approach to Radical Pedagogies: The School of Emergencies and Kirik
— With the participation of Dimitry Vilensky and Zeyno Pekünlü (Institute of Radical Imagination)7:30pm Artistic Platforms as Strategies of Subjectivation and Political Action: Art for UBI and Art for Radical Ecologies
— With the participation of Marco Baravalle, Gabriella Riccio and Emanuele Braga (Institute of Radical Imagination) -
Friday, 21 April 2023 CSA La Tabacalera (calle de Embajadores 51, Madrid)
Session 2
11am Research and Artistic Practices from Self-management
— With the participation of Pablo García Bachiller, Gabriella Riccio and Marco Baravalle (Institute of Radical Imagination) -
Friday, 21 April 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Session 3
Tickets6pm Approach to Radical Pedagogies: Raising Care
— With the participation of Maddalena Fragnito, Elena Blesa Cábez and Theo Prodromidis (Institute of Radical Imagination)7:30pm The Common and the Legal: Tools and Strategies
— With the participation of Giuseppe Micciarelli, Gabriella Riccio and Pablo García Bachiller (Institute of Radical Imagination)
Can a summer camp be considered a militant research practice? And the list of organic suppliers who stock a social centre’s canteen? In the following sessions, the Foundation of the Commons explores how spaces of knowledge production forged in the heat of social movements’ political and organisational practices are shaped. To this end, keys to two research devices are shared: Encuesta Inquilina (The Tenant Survey) — propelled with Sindicat de Llogaters from Barcelona — and the line of work around the eco-social crisis, articulated through the series of self-training and encounters The Future Is Unwritten. Organising in the Capitalocene Crisis. Drawing from these experiences, the aim is to put into practice possible militant research.
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Thursday, 25 May 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room and Online platform
Session 4
Online platform6:30pm La Encuesta Inquilina (The Tenant Survey)
— With the participation of IDRA (The Urban Research Institute of Barcelona) (Foundation of the Commons)7:45pm The Future Is Unwritten
— With the participation of Synusia, Katakrak and Traficantes de Sueños (Foundation of the Commons) -
Friday, 26 May 2023 Ateneo La Maliciosa (calle de las Peñuelas 14, Madrid)
Session 5
Online platform11am How Do We Conduct Militant Research?
— With the participation of IDRA, Synusia, Katakrak and Traficantes de Sueños (Foundation of the Commons)
This session sees La Laboratoria look to apply situated research to the systemic dimension and the interconnection between different forms of violence: social, sexual, economic, judicial. It looks to explore the potential of the situated epistemological perspective to deploy a radical critique of hegemonic discourses on violence or the role of States in legitimising and concealing some forms of violence and criminalising others, raising, from collective practices, the possibilities of transformative feminist justice. Alongside feminist researchers and collectives from Quito, Porto Alegre, Buenos Aires, New York and Madrid, and at the crossroads of movements for prison abolition, against the criminalisation of poverty, and dissident street feminisms, a space is opened from which to reflect on the possibilities of thinking about justice as a collective practice, where mutual protection, support, accountability and remediation go hand in hand with a critique of patriarchal, racist and class-biased logics.
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Wednesday, 5 July 2023 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
Session 6
Tickets5pm Introduction. What Does Investigating Violence from a Situated Perspective Mean?
— With the participation of Susana Draper (Madres Protectoras) and Itzell Sánchez (Técnicas Rudas / Colectiva Acción Directa Autogestiva). Supported by Débora Ávila7pm All that Crushes Us. Intersecting Violence
— With the participation of María José Barrera (Colectivo de Prostitutas de Sevilla), Luci Cavallero (Ni Una Menos) and Ana Pinto (Jornaleras de Huelva en lucha). Supported by Constanza CisnerosThis activity offers a play centre for children to help parents with childcare. The registration form can be found at this link.
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Thursday, 6 July 2023 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room and online platform
Session 7
Tickets5pm Debates around (Anti)Punitivism from Situated Feminist Struggles
— With the participation of Vicky García (La Laboratoria Nodo Europa Sur), Fernanda Martins and Laia Serra. Supported by Justa Montero7pm Beyond Victimisation. Feminist Self-defence and Strategies of Community Responsibility
— With the participation of Jazmin Sofia Escuntar Chavez (Mujeres de Frente), Martha Cecilia Collaguazo Velasco (Mujeres de Frente), Maria Jose "Guru" Jiménez Cortiñas (Asociación Gitanas Feministas por la Diversidad), Aida Elizabeth Pino Naranjo (Mujeres de Frente) and Helena Silvestre (Escola Feminista Abya Yala). Supported by Tatiana RomeroThis activity offers a play centre for children to help parents with childcare. The registration form can be found at this link.
Más actividades
![Blake Edwards, The Party [El guateque], 1968, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-14.jpg.webp)
Blake Edwards. The Party
Thursday, 20 August 2026
In The Party, actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is mistakenly invited to a glamorous dinner party in Hollywood. His curiosity and two left feet lead to one funny mishap after the other. During the soiree he consoles Michèle, a young actress who has been fired by her producer, and the chaos gathers momentum when Bakshi accidentally opens a retractable floor, making the guests fall into a swimming pool. A small hippie-style elephant gatecrashes the party, brought by a group of young people, and Bakshi asks the guests to wash the elephant as it is a sacred animal in his country. The house fills with soap suds, culminating in a wackily chaotic party.
When Stanley Kubrick was once asked who Peter Sellers was, he replied: “There is no such person as Peter Sellers”. The Party is one of the most widely recognised comedies in the history of film, its director Blake Edwards and the English actor making an entertaining critique of a fading conservative society. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s fit into the container of a choppy swimming pool: people from high society, an elephant, a Russian ballet, waiters, beatnik youth… similar to Sellers’s own identity: an empty vessel that can be refilled. In the film, Edwards tapped into the ingenious actor’s innate improvisation and the swimming pool as a container for revolutionary intent.
Lucrecia Martel. La ciénaga (The Swamp)
Viernes 21 de agosto, 2026
A couple of families spend the summer in a country cottage. The relationship between them exposes a crisis. The alcoholism of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) becomes clear, leading to a drift in the education of their children and impacting relationships of respect and affect. Weariness expresses the lackadaisical environment.
In La ciénaga Lucrecia Martel approaches the decadence of a middle-class Argentinian family. The pool of dirty, stagnant water reflects the economic and social collapse of a whole country, yet reflects more than economic crisis as it becomes a murky well feeding off the pain of those living in the house. An erstwhile space of joy, the swimming pool becomes a reflection of adult depression, resulting in apathy. And the children, especially the girls, seem to be the only people awake in this drift. Barring a flicker of unawareness, the young people immerse themselves in rainwater or the water from the river, in water that flows, but are cautious of getting too close to the swimming pool.
![Yorgos Lanthimos, Kynodontas [Canino], 2009, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-16_00.jpg.webp)
Yorgos Lanthimos. Dogtooth
Saturday, 22 August 2026
A couple with three adult children live in a modern country cottage. A large swimming pool takes centre stage in a sizeable garden. The property is skirted by a large fence that blocks a view of the outside. Here, the father has educated his children without outside contact, maintaining their belief in a false world: aeroplanes fall in the garden like toys and they must act like dogs to defend themselves from the ferocious cats that surround the house. The promise of going out into the world when they lose their dogtooth is proof of their maturity.
Lanthimos builds a world that is surreal, comical and terrible. The swimming pool is the house’s central element, a limited, controlled space assimilated like the sea, yet under the father’s supervision. A space of imagination, but with sinister intentions: the children are indoctrinated under the water as they believe in a better world. Far from reality. The swimming pool’s limits are the limits of their freedom, a false state of well-being expressed in the weightless bodies in the water. The liquid element is an analgesic magma with the power to educate offspring under the latent fear of a shark bite.
![Binka Zhelyazkova, Baseynat [La piscina], 1977, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-17_00.png.webp)
Binka Zhelyazkova. The Swimming Pool
Viernes 28 de agosto, 2026
The young, bright Bella (Yanina Kasheva), after unforeseen heartbreak at her graduation party, meets Apostol (Kosta Tsonev), a reserved architect, and Boyan (Kliment Denchev), a comedy actor who is cynical about his country. The three characters climb up to a diving board in a municipal swimming pool, where they begin a strange relationship of friendship, love and despair which reflects a generational clash.
Binka Zhelyazkova, the great enfant terrible of Eastern European cinema, critic of the communist system and widely acclaimed film-maker beyond Bulgarian borders, made in The Swimming Pool a masterly metaphor for a country in decline. The public pool symbolises a closed, immovable enclosure where society is festering. From the height of a diving board she sees, in a panoptic view, the different generations living underneath a limited space. On one side, older people attempt to preserve the old revolutionary spirit with constant collective swimming exercises while, on the other, young people don’t hide the desire for freedom that remains unrealised. The result is an ideological clash in how to act and move in the enclosure, unearthing vast hypocrisy in the lost ideals of socialism, reflected in the total apathy of youth. The Swimming Pool for Zhelyazkova is a reflection of the disillusionment and existential void of a whole country and system.
![Jacques Deray, La piscine [La piscina], 1969, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-18.jpg.webp)
Jacques Deray. The Swimming Pool
Saturday, 29 August 2026
The characters played by Alain Delon (Jean-Paul) and Romy Schneider (Marianne) experience their love in apparent splendour. A sun-drenched house, a blissful swimming pool, beautiful bodies, sexuality in abundance. The visit of Harry (Maurice Ronet), a successful musician, friend of Jean-Paul and ex-lover of Marianne, accompanied by his young and beautiful daughter Penélope (Jane Birkin), rocks their relationship, bringing to light the jealousy and insecurities of each one in a dark game of possession and male rivalry.
If there was a definition of the glistening blue pool in this sexual thriller, it would be the paradise of Adam and Eve, represented by the shots of happiness of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in this swimming pool on France’s Côte d’Azur. The appearance of these two beautiful creatures kissing semi-naked by the water is one of film’s resonant images. The paradise cannot be fractured, not even by death. As in the crossing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where humanity’s first lovers bathed naked in the water, innocent to their imminent end, the reflection of the crystalline water of The Swimming Pool shows this game, and the deep traumas which, under this mantle, are hidden in the amorous relationships and limits that only love is capable of breaking to solve.
In this session both endings to the film are screened: the original version, open and symbolic, and the Spanish version, marked by censorship during Francoism, and its sequence for a Spanish premiere — a stereotypical and reductive vision reflecting the sociological condition of the country.