Archives of the Commons VI
For an Archive Imagination
Clemente Padín, Signografía I (Signography I), 1968; Signografía IX (Signography IX), 1969; Signografía VIII (Signography VIII), 1969, experimental poetry
Courtesy of the Clemente Padín Archive and the Red Conceptualismos del Sur
Archives of the Commons, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, is a bi-annual encounter which came into being in 2015 out of the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces of creation and care for memories. Its aim is to put forward opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as giving thought to experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, essential exercises of imagination and critique to articulate and construct narratives of memory in resistance.
This sixth edition explores the notion of archival imagination, understanding archive practices not only as the safe-keeping of past memory, but also as speculative projections and the creating of worlds. American historian and writer Saidiya Hartman puts forward critical fabulation as a writing practice from which to respond to voids and the systemic violence of colonial archives. This means negotiating and exceeding their limits, and reclaiming life stories to recount the present as a practice of freedom, that which “could have been a story told with and against archive”.
Furthermore, in their introductory text, Fernanda Carvajal, Moira Cristiá and Javiera Manzi, members of the Red Conceptualimos del Sur, allude to the Archives of the Commons III publication on archive imagination as an active willingness to reformulate modes of making archive. Upon interrupting or flowing beyond norms (modes of classification, description and automated practices), imagination works as an “inventiveness available to times of caring for archives and respect for the singularity of their forms, a practice which enables past experience to be recovered and reformulated to respond to the present, beyond mere documentary organisation”.
From a constellation of practices and experiences made possible by this notion, the seminar convenes a whole programme of conversations which address the production, maintenance and reconstruction of archives lost from or non-existent in imagination. The different guest archives share and reflect on the methodologies, institutional forms and artistic gestures that have unfolded to deal with erasure and destruction, as well as absence and emptiness. They are all horizons which raise questions around an archive-based creative power that challenges a hegemonic linearity of time and history and invents new forms of naming and organising in its making.
In parallel to the seminar is the launch of the international graphic art campaign Why the Question and Not the Statement Today? convened by pasafronteras, the Red Conceptualismos del Sur publisher. This campaign is understood as “a cross-border seedbed of questions to shake up the world, to activate archives, to open futures”, in the words of artist Graciela Carnevale. Contributions to the campaign will be shown during the days of the encounter.
Organising committee
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi, Sara Buraya Boned, Lucía Cañada, Marjolaine David, Maria Mallol González, Guille Mongan and Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Organised by
The activities of this programme
Participants
Lucía Esperanza Bianchi
is a graphic artist, archivist and teacher. After studying at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) and, with a study grant, at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she has been part of the group Cuatro//// Intervenciones Gráficas and the graphic cooperative La Voz de la Mujer, as well as developing the collective project Romero Archive for/to come and the Colectiva Editora Des-bordes. She is currently coordinator of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, where she articulates research, archives and editorial projects linked to political memory and artistic practices in Latin America.
Lucía Cañada
holds a PhD in Art History and Theory and is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Her research focuses on the link between artistic practices and education during the dictatorships in Latin America. Since 2025 she has been in charge of cataloguing the political graphic art collection from the Juan Carlos Romero Archive. She is also part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network node and develops the Romero Archive for/to come project.
Marjolaine David Briand
is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and Bordeaux Montaigne University. Her research focuses on artistic and political forms of occupying urban space developed by artistic, sexual-dissident and feminist activisms in Argentina from 2001 to 2021. She is part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network Archive node and the team of Red Constelaciones, an activism and research project which looks to create a digital archive tool of aesthetics and poetics in street interventions and struggles from Argentina.
Bertha Díaz
is a researcher, teacher and independent editor who currently lives in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Research in the Arts, Humanities and Education from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Díaz co-directs the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones and is a member of the research group ARTEA and the International Network of Latin American and European Theatre Researchers (RITTLE). She has worked with art platforms in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama, France, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, and, through live arts, her work experiments with ties between bodies, thought and writings, focusing on their sensorial, affective and political dimensions.
Awel Haouati
is a researcher in Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Her work centres on press photography during the 1990s war in Algeria. In 2019 she founded the project Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie (Archives of Women’s Struggles in Algeria), which she manages jointly with Saadia Gacem, a fellow researcher in anthropology. She also works as an independent writer and photographer.
Marta María Hernangómez
holds a degree in Geography and History, an MA in Electronic Administration and Government, and is a civil servant in the Faculty Corps of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists. She collaborates with the project Aulas con Memoria (Classrooms with Memory), from the Association to Recover Historical Memory, and with the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation. Currently, she is the director of the Historical Archive of Social Movements, a state archive created in 2021, under Spain’s Ministry of Culture, with the sole remit of preserving documentary and bibliographic heritage generated and conserved by different organisations and social movements in contemporary Spain, making it available to the public.
Ana Longoni
is a writer, lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), curator and researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. She was director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department from 2018 to 2021. Moreover, she is one of the founders of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and develops the Romero Archive for/to come project. She holds a PhD in Argentinian art, specialising in the crossover of art and politics in Latin America from the 1960s to the present.
Ivette Quezada
is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Her research reflects on memory and the influence of artistic and creative practices in questioning notions of cultural heritage and the ways in which history in violent contexts is perceived and represented. Since 2022, she has worked in collaboration with the Casa de la Mujer de Huamachuco, linked to arpilleras and their creation, circulation and archiving.
Maria Mallol
works in the Tentacular Museum Department of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Directorship.
Guille Mongan
is an art historian, independent researcher, curator, teacher and artist. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts History from the Arts Faculty at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata (UNLP), in La Plata, Argentina, and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from MNCARS/UAM Madrid, and at present she is a PhD candidate in History at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales (IDAES) from the Universidad de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. She is a member of the artistic activism collective Serigrafistas Queer and the Southern Conceptualisms Network platform for research, debate and collective positions, where she currently works as a coordinator.
Mario Rodríguez Dávila
is a film-maker, cultural manager, artistic researcher and co-director of the publisher Manso Rojo Ediciones. His filmography has been shown in France, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, England, Colombia and Ecuador, while his works move between archive and documentary fiction, as well as the search for memory and individual and collective poetic-political history, with not only people at the centre but also exterior and interior landscapes and geographies. He is currently studying an MA in Communication Sciences at Universidad Nova de Lisboa, specialising in Film and Television, while he works on his film projects.
Tania Romero Barrios
is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, specialising in Gender Studies, at the University of Paris 8, and holds a degree in Quechua Language and Literature from INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales). She is a member of the LER (Laboratoire d’Études Romanes) labs and CERLOM (Centre d’Ètude et de Recherche sur les Littératures et les Oralités du Monde), and coordinates the multilingual museographic project Warmikuna - voces, rostros y memorias. Her research focuses on Peruvian literature in Spanish and Quechua, memory, political violence and Latin American feminisms.
Ana Kutleša
is an art historian, researcher and curator. She is a member of the curatorial collective [BLOK], founded in Zagreb in 2001, which aims to democratise art and culture, articulating resistance against privatisation attempts. In 2018 she started The Trešnjevka Neighborhood Museum project, working jointly with the community from the Trešnjevka neighbourhood to build a virtual collection of artistic, cultural and political productions to vindicate the memory of people living in the area, a working-class neighbourhood whose history has been omitted from national archives and institutions.
Laura Pelayo
is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. With a PhD in Art History and Theory from the Autonomous University of Madrid, her professional career as a researcher in contemporary art goes hand in hand with her growing interest in the possibilities that libraries and archives offer culture and the development of contemporary artistic practices. Since 2019 she has worked in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre, focusing on archives, dissemination and driving forward research activity.
More activities
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.
