TIZ 3. Political Matter

Neighbourhood memories belong to the inhabitants — their situated experiences, relationships, celebrations, conflicts and traumas — the spaces they occupy, mutual support networks and struggles to improve both their lives and their environment. In this edition of Situated Voices dialogue takes place around the different experiences and strategies to build collective memory, from the certainty that producing and caring for neighbourhood memories is essential for improving the living conditions of people that inhabit them.

Coordinated by: the Postory research group – Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)
Organized by: GRIGRI, Museo Situado and the Postory research group - Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)
Collaboration: Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)

This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties. The programme comprises tables to debate themes and presents the performance Neither True Nor False, which Argentinian activist and artist Mariela Scafati has been developing since 2013 as an exercise of memory that revisits the last twenty years of her committed practice in serigraphic activism.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network
Collaboration: Mexican Embassy in Spain, Cultural Diplomacy of Mexico, Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain and hablarenarte
With the support of: Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (Proyecto Fondecyt/ANID nº 11201004)

This workshop aims to collectively produce hand-painted cardboard posters which serve as tools to grant visibility for social campaigns. On this occasion, work is carried out specifically with the campaign #ESenciales* #RegularizacionYa (#ESsential* #RegularisationNow), which fights to obtain the extraordinary regularisation of 500,000 people in an irregular administrative situation and who cannot exercise their rights in the Spanish State.

Coordinated by: Guillermina Mongan
Organised by: Museo Situado and the Southern Conceptualisms Network

This activity focuses on the body, flash mobs and textiles as strategies to burst into public space. The initiative is carried out in dialogue with the demonstrations of domestic and care workers to pass Agreement 189 of the International Work Organisation (OIT), which looks to level up the work situation of domestic workers in Spain with other workers.

Coordinated by: Guillermina Mongan
Organised by: Museo Situado and the Southern Conceptualisms Network

This workshop seeks to create a space of reflection to collectively build slogans that can be projected in public space using the video mapping technique and which help to stress social problems such as health exclusion in the Spanish State. Following the passing of Royal Decree-Law 16/2012, of 20 April, access to the National Health System (SNS) in Spain is linked to people’s administrative situation, making it increasingly less accessible and universal.

Coordinated by: Guillermina Mongan
Organised by: Museo Situado and the Southern Conceptualisms Network

A film retrospective which explores the work of Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) and underground culture in transition-to-democracy Spain, focusing on the historical feature-length films he made from 1975 to 1986. The series dispenses with a traditional historicist and revisionist orientation to situate the film-maker in a contemporary dialogue, in thematic sessions, with young artists and producers, his major themes reverberating among them: sex as a free territory, misfits and the socially marginalised as lucid and honest anti-heroes, the radical co-existence between the exalted and the popular and music — flamenco, psychodelia, sevillanas — as an eruption of the real in fiction.  

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (19th International Film Festival)

Carl Einstein was an avant-garde poet and writer, theorist and art critic. His political commitment shaped his life and work, in an understanding of art as a process that transforms human beings and reality. Through this vision, his life was traversed by concerns centring on politically and formally committed artistic processes, with this room displaying examples of the artists Einstein wrote about, for instance Picasso, Miró and Dalí, in addition to the different African masks he collected (from the Yoruba, Senufo, Baule and Punu peoples).

The Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, held in Paris in 1937, was conceived as a propaganda device to defend the Spanish Republic’s advances and demonstrate and denounce the dire situation the Spanish people faced in the Civil War. The Pavilion’s different spaces were enlivened by film screenings, concerts, dance recitals and theatre performances, along with a display of photographs, ceramics and textiles, anchoring the idea that the political situation at the time must not overshadow the long history of popular tradition.

Artistic production and political activity are indistinguishable in the figure of Josep Renau. Throughout his exiles, Renau worked on murals, prints and editorial work, for instance those he contributed to the magazine Futuro, posters made within the sphere of the Taller de Gráfica Popular and, finally, different works for film and television, using animation to transmit information. In this room, a number of posters made for different Mexican campaigns, and from exile between 1939 and the 1950s, are displayed, alongside a major representation of copies of the magazine Futuro, paradigms of the artist’s use of photomontage.

The image of Mexico at the forefront of the international Left was synthesised primarily in the Taller de Gráfica Popular (The Workshop for Popular Graphic Art), a collective of Mexican printmakers that surfaced to support and disseminate revolutionary social causes. It was founded in 1937 by Raúl Anguiano, Luis Arenal, Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins at the heart of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists and worked with different exiled artists and printmakers to produce a number of their most acclaimed folders of work, some of which are part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.

Under Chile’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), a new generation of artists emerged with a will to surreptitiously challenge Pinochetismo. Certain artists and groups shaped the period with a counter-institutional practice questioning canonical art languages, doing so through photography, video, mass printing techniques and, above all, performance and direct action in public space. Their aim was to redefine the conditions of their creative participation and transform behaviour and discourse in everyday life. The selection of works and artists in this room refers to two exhibitions of “unofficial” Chilean art organised in Europe: the Paris Biennale in 1982 and Chile Vive (Chile Lives), held in Madrid in 1987.

The 2011 movements occupying squares denoted a key moment in the collective response to inequalities and the precariousness of the capitalist system. Camps in squares became a metaphor for community, a new way to occupy public space, also turning it into a place of artistic production. An exercise in community creativity whereby large collective collages were articulated through slogans, posters, drawings, poems and DIY banners. The selection of materials in this room chiefly centres around Acampada Sol, the first of Spain’s tent cities which occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol from 15 May to 12 June 2011. Chosen alongside them are elements which stem from the social struggles undertaken after the camp-out and related to the vindication of public services, the right to housing and opposition to the austerity measures imposed by Spanish and European governments.

This exhibition centres its research on the development and exchange between different purportedly obsolete and anti-technology print media — woodcuts, wood engravings, linocut and lithography — and its role and means of distribution in divergent geopolitical and social contexts.

Curators: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) focused the beginning of his career on painting, before expanding his interests towards three-dimensional experimentations, allowing him to explore the interrelationships between bodies and spaces. A significant part of his work challenges the concept of architecture as a language of power, calling into question deep-seated inertia such as order, solidity and eternity. The graphic documentation of the process ends up the only “ruin”, the only reminder, of architecture that once existed. Modes of doing, and undoing, which underscore at once the constant mutability of the artistic process and the performative character of its social interaction. 

An exhibition devoted to the work of Alejandra Riera which assays the poetic modes of making place through a recurring image in her practice: a collective canvas, which for this occasion takes the form of a garden in movement. Beyond a retrospective, the exhibition seeks to experiment with the “how” of poetically renewing via a unique and shared experience, gestures and questionings which emerge from the archives of “lieuxdétudes” (places of studies) started by the artist almost three decades ago and unfurled here. The result of individual effort and long-term commitment, these Lieuxdétudes build and sustain affective and sensitive settings, spaces for interrogation and collective breathing.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall is the outcome of a long collective research process conducted by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía. The exhibition puts forward a survey of graphic art initiatives which have, from the 1960s to the present day, confronted urgent, politically oppressive contexts in Latin America, articulating strategies of transformation and resistance that radically changed art-making, the way in which it established intersubjective links, built communities, and even circulated graphic supports.

Curator: Southern Conceptualisms Network
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
With the support of: Embassy of the Argentine Republic