A Story Behind Each Transfer
A Performative Presentation of the Photographic Workshop on Remittances
Held on 07 mar 2022
Remittances are periodic transfers of money or products used by migrant workers in a precarious position to support their families, thereby contributing to the fragile economies of their places of origin. In June 2021, in the encounter Remittances: Care Here and There, held in the Museo Reina Sofía as part of the Situated Voices programme, the need to grant visibility to the stories behind these transfers to the other side of the ocean developed.
Around this idea a workshop was organised and coordinated by photographer Hanna Jarzabek, the results of which are displayed in this performative presentation. The initiative, developed from October to December 2021, was aimed at domestic workers who are part of the collective Territorio Doméstico, which in turn is part of Museo Situado.
Across two sessions in the workshop, different visual accounts were assembled, with the starting point images that participants’ families send of what they can require with resources they have received, on the one hand, and photographs they have taken to highlight the effort involved in generating them, on the other. These images, exhibited during this encounter, introduce the individual story of each participant, while also helping to address common issues such as work carried out by the migrant population in a precarious position, the unequal division of jobs, care, and the role of women inside this cross-border logic. The encounter also featured the participation of researcher and writer Ana Longoni.
Hanna Jarzabek (1976, Poland) is a photographer with an MA in Political Science from the University of Geneva. She has worked for UN agencies such as the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and since 2008 she has lived in Spain, where she works as a freelance photojournalist for news websites like BuzzFeed News, El País, XLSemanal and Equal Times, among others. She also combines this work with teaching photography and other personal projects which address discrimination and social dysfunction in the West, gender identity, and sexual diversity.
Ana Longoni (1967, Argentina) is a researcher, writer and lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires who holds a PhD in Philosophy and Literature (majoring in Art History) and specialises in the crossroads between Latin American art and politics. From 2018 to July 2021, she was director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Public Activities and Study Centre.
Territorio Doméstico is a collective which came into being in 2006 as a space of encounter, care and women’s struggles, mostly migrant women’s, for the recognition of their diminished rights as domestic workers and to give care work more visibility. In 2019, they released the record Sin nosotras se para el mundo (Without Women the World Stops), a compilation of songs that give a voice to the situation these female workers face and were played on the streets to animatedly vindicate their struggles. And in 2020 they carried out the radio series and theatre piece They Wanted Arms but People Arrived on migration and domestic work.
Colabora
Territorio Doméstico
Organiza
Participants
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.