Film and Video

On March 16 and 17, 2021, the 22nd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference will be held, organized by the Department of Conservation-Restoration of the Reina Sofía Museum, with the support of the Mapfre Foundation.

A lecture by art historian Ariel Jiménez, the curator of the exhibition The Weight of Form. The Graphic Design of Carlos Cruz-Diez, will shed light on one of the artist’s most prolific but lesser-known sides: his output in the field of graphic design, where he played a key role in the development of Venezuela’s publishing industry.

This conversation between people with first-person trans* experiences, their families and their environments seeks to situate the specific demands of the collectives involved, and to understand the key parts to this future law and the problems underlying the controversies it provokes.   

On the basis that humour is never neutral, as well as its capacity to question the established order and work as a powerful normalising force, this encounter interrogates supposedly humorous images which instead instil prejudice and normalise stereotypes.

They Wanted Arms but People Arrived is a radio series and theatre piece on migration and domestic work, written and performed by women from the Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory) association and featuring the participation of sound artist Susana Jiménez Carmona and the work cooperative Pandora Mirabilia.

This edition of the Chair, comprising a master lecture and a seminar, sees Margarita Ledo set forth a reflection on the body as a remnant, as a point of arrival after tracing an invisible thread that extends across film based on memory, anti-establishment practices, the marginalisation of women in public spaces, the estrangement of their own bodies and the power of essay films as an artistic practice.

What would happen if we thought of care as a job? What is stopping us from thinking that way? What is gained and what is lost? Why don’t those who provide care have the right to rest, retire and receive payment? Why does this activity remain marginalised from the productive, the public and the visible? And what if we thought and wrote about rights, payment and the relationships of bodies that gestate and support?

On the ocassion of the Concha Jerez retrospective, Our Memory Is Being Stolen (29 July – 11 January 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter with the artist, alongside critic and theorist Mieke Bal and critic and exhibition curator Fernando Castro Flórez, two figures behind the exhibition catalogue and the participation of Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofía.

The two volumes of Theremonial (Beat Generation, 2017 and 2019) see Javier Díez Ena pay homage to the timbre of the theremin, a musical instrument, invented in 1919 by Russian musician Lev Termen, with a sound customarily associated with US horror film and sci-fi scores from the 1950s or as an ominous addition in relatively traditional pop music creations.

Gestural Apparatuses and Echoic Landscapes is a workshop which approaches the revolt of the “singular guerrilla” composed in Fernand Deligny’s endeavours in Cévennes National Park, France, between 1969 and 1996.    

Territorio Doméstico: Politicising Aprons, Pots and Streets is a documentary audiovisual piece that records the history of the make-up and struggle of the feminist collective Territorio Doméstico, a group of domestic workers who live in the Community of Madrid but come from all over the world.  

The programme Together and Rising Up assembles a series of activities, exhibitions, rooms from the Collection, study groups, guided tours and digital projects inside the Museo, to be presented over the course of 2021, and thus reflecting the plural nature of transfeminist struggles and the complexity of new challenges for feminism. 

Night of Ideas is an annual event propelled since 2016 by the Institut français in Paris and occasions a reflection on the major challenges of our times. The sixth edition of the event in 2021 is held under the title Proches (Close) and sets out to rethink the relations between living beings and new forms of solidarity.

Pan-Pan Kolektiva sets out from the hypothesis that the current situation is giving rise to collective trauma and from the following question: Do we have the necessary tools to listen to each other or do we need to create new ones?

The 2021 Aníbal Quijano Chair programme, organised by Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre, will seek to address and disentangle the meanings of that paradox from far-reaching perspectives and political projects of the present — feminisms, environmentalism, anti-racist and decolonial movements — taken as vectors which question and stir political orthodoxies.