Reframing Banana Imagery
Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s
Ingo Niehaus, Costa Rica Banana Republic, 1975, film
Image Archive of the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture and Youth
“Banana republic” is a pejorative term used to describe politically unstable countries that are reliant on an economy with a bedrock of one sole product and dominated by foreign interests and corrupt elites. The concept, which surfaced in the early twentieth century in Central America, refers to the power of US multinationals, such as the United Fruit Company, over governments, natural resources and economic structures from the region. This series, therefore, examines how Central American political cinema from the 1970s and 1980s appropriated this stigma as it reclaimed a unique space in narrations of emancipation and anti-colonisation.
The earliest celluloid recordings of Central America are of “exotic” beauty pageants, odes to the productivity of banana enclaves and the visual propaganda serving dominant military powers. The clichés of the servile day labourer loading up sacks with a smile, the impenetrable otherness of the tropical jungle and the condescendence towards “farmer simplicity” all come from outside images, from the external gaze.
Standing opposite memories fragmented by decades of violence and forgetting, this series sets forth a reencounter with an exceptional time of production in the 1970s and 1980s, when the region’s film-making sought to expand its visual history and became a tool of political and identity-based construction. Along with independent film-makers from inside and outside the region, different organisations, institutions and collectives looked to engage in direct dialogue with the singular nature of their immediate surroundings and with the ardent anti-imperialism sweeping through Central America: the Cinema Department in Honduras; its namesake in Costa Rica; INCINE in Nicaragua; the Experimental Group of University Film-makers in Panama; the Cinematography of Guatemala; and, in El Salvador, the Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda and Sistema Radio Venceremos collectives.
The series comprises three programmes which trace an arc running from territorial bases and farming stories to the call to arms and waning insurgency. The first programme lays the groundwork of the spectres of agrarian exploitation and the forms of resistance that emerged from the rural environment. The second rises up to approach the body as a battlefield, where patriarchal and state violence are explored via dissident expressions in the formal and the political. The third programme culminates in an epic saga which crosses borders and registers to embody experiences of the armed struggle and the promise of revolution.
This filmic undertaking seeks to reactivate buried conversations on how these images engendered forms of organisation and collective desire that still resonate in present-day Central America. Rather than an archive-based archaeology, it seeks an active dialogue, where the grammars of the films move through the lyrical, the visceral, the didactic and the insurgent, and always with the intention of reframing official history from the margins.
Curatorship
Alonso Aguilar
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation
Acknowledgements
The Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre (CCCA)
The activities in this programme
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.
Participants
Alonso Aguilar Candanedo
is a Costa Rican-Panamanian film critic, independent film programmer and audiovisual producer. He also teaches Film and Audiovisual Media, with a research focus on Central American political film productions from the 1970s and 1980s.
Valeria Alfaro
is a film programmer and audiovisual curator from Costa Rica. With a degree in Film and Television from the Universidad LCI Veritas (San José, Costa Rica) and an MA in Curating from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, she has been part of curating the Lúdico, Ícaro and shnit festivals and is part of the team of Cine Cauce, as well as writing about Central American film and video art for Mapa del Cine, La Rabia and Chiquilla te Quiero.
Tito Castillo
is an editor and cultural manager who has contributed to cultural and journalistic initiatives, such as HoraCero, Editorial Barrilete and Gigante Press, linked to literary dissemination and journalism in Central America. He currently works as a coordinator of Content and Workshops at the Centroamérica Cuenta festival.
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.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
Inclusive Policies and Practices
19, 20 JUN 2026
In conjunction with World Refugee Day, which takes place on 20 June 2026, Museo Situado and GRIGRI jointly organise this international encounter to foster the discussions, debates and exchange of practices which uphold solidarity with migrant people in European Union countries.
The programme, conceived as a space of exchange and the collective construction of knowledge, comprises a workshop of collaborative creation, discussions, a community meal and a film forum — activities designed by a local committee made up of young people under the age of thirty from different territories in Europe. The policy recommendations on welcoming people with migrant backgrounds and hospitality in urban contexts that arise from this encounter will be presented in Brussels at the end of 2026.
These sessions are developed within the context of the European cooperation project Bridging Borders and are framed inside the tenth anniversary of the GRIGRI Pixel project.
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.