Places/Traces is accompanied by three conversations and a film screening, each approaching the archive — a thread that links Bonillas’s practice with Sordo Madaleno’s own. In 2000, Bonillas inherited his grandfather’s photographic archive, which he named the J. R. Plaza Archive; it became the matrix for more than twenty works produced between 2003 and 2016. Sordo Madaleno, founded in 1937 and now in its third generation, works from a parallel inheritance.

Tracing Archival Memories (Sunday 11 October, 16:00)
Artist Iñaki Bonillas in conversation with Dr Gabriella Nugent, a London-based art historian and curator who has written extensively about Mexican art and has made several trips to Mexico, during which she has had the opportunity to see Bonillas’s work on display on a couple of occasions. For this reason, it was only natural for this conversation to take place between them, given that they share countless common interests regarding art and Mexico.
The works featured in Places/Traces will serve as the starting point for this conversation, which will also focus on family and historical photographic archives and how they relate to individual and collective memory.

Activating Archival Histories (Wednesday 11 November, 18:30)
PhD Architect, curator, and scholar Gabriel Hernández is in discussion with María Páez González, Associate Professor and Programme Director at The Bartlett School of Architecture, about mapping connections and research possibilities through archival engagement with a range of sources and methods.

Faces Places (Wednesday 2 December, 18:30)
A screening of Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places, selected by artist Iñaki Bonillas, who reads the film as an archive of architectural space, where places are defined by the traces of life they hold. It’s a reading close to his own practice, from the furniture imprints on the rugs of Luis Barragán’s house to the still lifes he meticulously records.

Forecasting Archival Collections (Thursday 21 January, 18:30)
London-based architect, designer and educator Bryce Suite, Senior Associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is in conversation with Benito Blanco, Associate Principal at Sordo Madaleno. Taking Sordo Madaleno’s New Collection Centre for the Hungarian Natural History Museum and the V&A East Storehouse as case studies, they explore what it means to design for a living archive on display.