Marisa González. Art, Memory and Commitment
Marisa González, El muro
De la serie «Nuclear Lemóniz», 2993-2004
Within the framework of the anthological exhibition devoted to Marisa González (Bilbao, 1943), this two-session public programme explores two specific strands of González’s life and career arc. On one side, the Nuclear Lemóniz (2003–2004) project, with the screening of an audiovisual piece made around the work, and, on the other, a round-table discussion on the associative movement of artists in the late 1960s and the early years of democracy in Spain, revised from a feminist perspective.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Angiola Bonanni
(Rome, 1942) is an artist, a painter’s daughter, who relinquished her philosophy studies to focus on making iron sculptures. By the time she moved to Spain, in the early 1960s, she had already taken part in different collective shows for young artists, holding her first solo show at Galería Neblí in Madrid in 1966, which featured a short introduction by poet José Hierro. She would soon become involved in the associative and democratising efforts of Spain’s culture sectors, and in the 1980s her work transitioned from sculpture to installation, and then to video. In recent years, she has been exploring issues of feminism, multiculturalism and immigration.
Marisa González
(Bilbao, 1943) is an artist and pioneer in the use of new technology applied to art. The reproduction of images and the use of fragments and repetition to generate form are constants running through her practice. González also trained extensively in music and visual arts: she studied piano at the Music Conservatory of Bilbao and obtained degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1971, an MA from the Art Institute of Chicago (USA) in 1973 and a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of the Arts in Washington D.C. in 1976, where she also received an End-of-Degree Award. Her art-making, based on the assemblage of techniques, has been exhibited widely at many art institutions, with over sixty solo and 150 collective shows, and her work is part of different major collections. In 2023, she was the winner of Spain’s Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts.
Violeta Janeiro Alfageme
(Vigo, 1982) holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her work focuses on the memory of women’s resistance movements against the Spanish dictatorship and on collaborative, community and procedural artistic practices which impact the public sphere. She has co-curated exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) (Móstoles, Madrid), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) (Mexico City), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (MARCO) (Vigo, Pontevedra), and curated projects at Städtische Galerie Kubus (Hannover, Germany) and Matadero Madrid. In 2023 and 2024 she directed the FotoNoviembre XVII International Photography Biennial. Her exhibition ¿Cómo continuar? (How to Continue?) [Lima, 2021] won an award from the Association of Curators in Peru. At the present time, she is putting together a show for Le 19, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain (CRAC) (Montbéliard, France).
Concha Jerez
(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1941) is a pre-eminent artist who has been honoured with Spain’s National Award for Plastic Arts (2015) and the Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts (2017). Jerez’s creative output has been prolific since the 1970s, starting from conceptual art and materialising into site-specific interventions with a strong critical quality. A performance pioneer in Spain, she has made an array of sound and radiophonic artworks, most notably those created with sound artist and composer José Iges.
More activities
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.
