Marisa González. Art, Memory and Commitment
Marisa González, El muro (The Wall)
From the “Nuclear Lemóniz”, 2003–2004 series
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
The activities of this programme
The Feminist Genealogies of Artistic Associationism in the Final Stages of Francoism and the Early Years of Democracy
Past activity
— Conducted by Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in dialogue with curator Violeta Janeiro Alfageme
The starting point of this encounter is the birth of awareness around the artistic subject as a political agent and their capacity to emphasise their own autonomy within the sphere of visual arts. This acquired awareness, which came to light in a context of repression and institutional exclusion, was key to creating an associative movement which engendered the Union Association of Plastic Artists in the Spanish State, validated legally in 1977.
From a feminist perspective, this round-table discussion examines this associative movement of artists through the political and artistic trajectory of three core figures: Marisa González, Angiola Bonanni and Concha Jerez, in conversation with curator and researcher Violeta Janeiro Alfageme. Their experiences thus allow for a critical genealogy of artistic associationism to be traced, and its transformative role at a time when women’s subjectivity was excluded and constrained to the roles of mother and wife.
Lemóniz through Archive
Past activity
— Conducted by Marisa González and Violeta Janeiro Alfageme, the show’s curator
Over the course of 2025, Marisa González has worked on digitising valuable unreleased videographic materials, hitherto conserved on video tapes. These images were recorded by the artist in 2003 and 2004, when she documented the dismantling of the Lemóniz nuclear power station, a work which recovered not only a visual archive, but also reconstructed a personal and political archive. Upon reviewing and ordering this material, González reinterprets and resignifies the past, establishing a dialogue between her individual testimony and the collective memory of the anti-nuclear struggle in the Spanish State.
The work shows art’s capacity to reopen still-unresolved debates, particularly in a present shaped by the energy crisis and its reactivation of old controversies. More than simply recording the past, this reworking becomes a critical tool for thinking about the present.
After the screening, artist and curator will engage in a conversation involving the audience on the meaning of retrieving these images, the memories they preserve and which of them fade over time.
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
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.
Dear Felix:
Saturdays at 6pm
The immediately recognisable art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which is on display, from May to October 2026, in the show Sweet Revenge, moves beyond the transmission of messages laden with poetic evocation, vital or biographical reflection, or even a clear political or ethical positioning. Rather, it seeks an active response by visitors to the exhibition. His work invites engagement with these messages so that, whether delighting, moving or challenging, it still prompts viewers to participate in the dialogue and complete the artistic undertaking with their own actions.
Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
1926–2026: One Hundred Years of the Lyceum Club Femenino
Thursday, 2 July 2026
The Lyceum Club Femenino (Lyceum Women’s Club) was established in Madrid in 1926, constituting a space which opened new pathways for women to participate in Spain’s intellectual, artistic and political life in the first third of the twentieth century, and for figures such as designer Victorina Durán, pedagogue María de Maeztu, lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and artist Ángeles Santos, to name but a few. To mark the Madrid Club’s one hundredth anniversary, this research symposium examines its role as a key place for studying women’s and feminist culture in Spain’s Silver Age by analysing and vindicating the different agencies, trajectories and cultural projects that structured the space.
By way of three lectures and two round-table discussions, the symposium sets forth a journey through the Lyceum Club Femenino and the cultural context from which it emerged, from its standing as a pioneering institution to the study of cultural material from the period and the process of constructing the figure of the “modern woman”. These talks and discussions look to shed light on how new ways of thinking, creating and occupying public space were shaped, expanding the gaze on cultural, educational and social networks linked to the Lyceum — as much concerning its ties with other intellectual and artistic circles as the continuity and transformation of these networks during Republican exile. Finally, the symposium features three artistic interventions conceived to recover the artistic legacy of this space in Madrid.
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the Ministry of Culture’s cultural programme focused on the centenary of the Lyceum Club Femenino via these sessions, co-organised with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
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.
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.
