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
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.
