Film and Video

As a medicine cabinet well stocked with first aid material, the project looks to delve deeper into the conception of care with the help of ideas and useful resources to identify what is good for us collectively and to open pathways that allow us to live differently. All of this is mutually understood with the knowledge, particularly migrant knowledge, and experiences of people who inhabit this collectiveness in the search for a multicultural community neighbourhood with shared future perspectives.

El Picnic del barrio es, para l+s vecin+s de Lavapiés (Madrid), una celebración del estar juntas y del hacer solidario que caracteriza la vida en el barrio. La iniciativa, que tuvo su primera edición en junio de 2018, adquiere en esta ocasión una especial connotación de reencuentro.

To mark the end of the documentary exhibition The Weight of Form. The Graphic Design of Carlos Cruz-Diez, the Museo Reina Sofía organises Modern South, a conversation which, starting from Carlos Cruz-Diez’s graphic and publishing work, explores different areas related to graphic art in Venezuela, comparing it to events in other Latin American countries, in addition to the subsequent evolution of graphic design in the region. 

Soledad Liaño, curator of Ida Applebroog. Marginalias, leads a tour around the said exhibition, taking selected readings from the artist’s diary, to be recited publicly for the first time alongside her visual work by actress Nuria Mencía.

This new edition of Situated Voices puts forward, in line with its format as an assembly-based, horizontal forum bringing together experiences, involvement in and knowledge of today’s pressing issues, a conversation on remittances from a feminist viewpoint, situating the focus on the crossreads between migration, the unequal division of jobs, care, and the role of women inside this cross-border logic.

The year 2019 marked eighty years since the start of Republican exile, framed in the context of a global migration crisis and with clear parallels between the new and old fields of the displaced in Europe. The memory of Iberian diaspora thus became part of a much larger history of displacement and return, a history which did not begin with the Civil War, did not end in the Transition to democracy in Spain, and does not have Spaniards as the sole protagonists. This lecture takes up this synchrony to consider new relationship modes with Republican exiles.

What does remembering the ethical, aesthetic and political experiences of Republican exiles mean eighty years later within the global context of the climate emergency and migrant crisis? By way of these premises, this seminar, conducted by lecturer and researcher Germán Labrador Méndez, sets forth a discussion around certain points in time from Spain’s stateless archive as it seeks to establish moments of rupture, in which the destituent powers and the utopian potential of diasporic experience are expounded.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council, present a retrospective on Luke Fowler (Glasgow, 1978), a celebrated British artist, film-maker and musician. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, Fowler explores the relationship between subject and archive, memory and history through the possibilities afforded by experimental cinema.

In this encounter, Hanan Dalouh Amghar, Maggie Schmitt and three activists from northern Morocco they met on their trip will discuss the situation of the feminist movement in the context of present-day Morocco, exploring issues, leading figures, disputes and challenges and placing the stress on the diversity of initiatives, priorities and practices, and on the different realities of country and city, centre and periphery.

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía participates in the annual International Museum Day —celebrated internationally since 1977 — under the 2021 slogan proposed by ICOM (the International Council of Museums) of “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”, and thus prompts a reconsideration of the idea of a living, open institution.

This audiovisual series pivots on cinema’s future imagining with films made between 1920 and 2020, an historical expanse of one hundred years in which the future is manifested as an idea at odds with progress conceived as dogma, as a radical critique of the present, and as a yearning for new worlds. What are the imagined futures in the past and which future is projected and desired in our present? 

This second edition sees artist Carme Nogueira share her art-making as she revisits, with a group of Museo Reina Sofía workers, her project Tenerife (2020), in which she engages in dialogue with the homonymous 1932 film by Yves Allégret and Eli Lotar, who both worked with Luis Buñuel on the documentary Las Hurdes. Land without Bread (1933).

Meta Music Machines is a research project which seeks to develop and build a digitally automated composer, a machine-sculpture that produces new sound creations, recombining information extracted from music indexed in different sound archives. Oscar Martín’s work in progress had adopted, over time, different formats and names, according to the spheres of artistic and research-based creation in which it is displayed.

Women’s right to decide and the struggles for reproductive and sexual rights have formed one of the channels of articulation for feminisms, and are currently configured as a driving force that imbues debates with vitality and generates new energies. This debate looks at different political, organisational, technological and mutual support strategies for feminist movements, as well as contributing to reflecting and constructing feminist thought by activisms in different territories; namely, in Argentina, Poland, Italy, El Salvador and Spain.

This new edition analyzes the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles — directed by poet Abdellatif Laâbi, it brought together the most relevant voices in poetry, art and thought from post-colonial Maghreb from 1966 until it was banned at the beginning of 1972.

In this Humanities Series, Marco Baravalle, Ferran Barenblit, Manuel Borja-Villel, Timothy Morton, Nelly Richard and Hito Steyerl all outline their reflections around rethinking forms of cultural production and institutions as spaces that extend beyond representation is inescapable.

In conjunction with the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 (from 31 March to 27 September 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises Between So Many, a conversation between artists Safaa Erruas, Karim Rafi and Younes Rahmoun and the show’s curator, Abdellah Karroum, who will moderate and activate the debate.

In the Meantime seeks to offer diverse possibilities for thinking about and placing context around the Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020 show, organised inside a framework of cultural cooperation between Spain and Morocco in the sphere of Museums and promoted by the National Foundation of Museums from the Kingdom of Morocco and the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, in collaboration with Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.

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.

In a remembrance of Samba on the anniversary of her death, the Platform in Memory of Samba and Museo Situado organised a participatory action involving the creation of a large collective bunch of flowers made up of artworks in different formats and left on 19 December 2020 in the cemetery where her body lies. In total, more than forty works in her memory were submitted.

What are we talking about when we say indigenous contemporary art? How can we approach racialised artistic practices, beyond a violent colonial translation? What does it mean to think about ancestry as an ontological force? This activity, the title of which draws inspiration from the poem Ojer bix re ri kik’el (The Blood’s Old Song), by the K’iche’ Maya writer Humberto Ak’abal, sets forth an introduction to artistic practices articulated from places of occlusion and silence.  

Narcisa Hirsch is one of the foremost figures in the history of Latin American and international experimental film. Born in Germany in 1928, and living in Argentina since her childhood, her name has lurked in the shadows unduly, owing to a twofold “eccentricity”: being a woman and making films that lie outside central spaces constructing the history of this filmic modality: the United States and Europe.  

This encounter, therefore, sets out to convene, converse with and create fruitful exchanges between some of the leading figures in these struggles, setting out from the conviction that, from their view of the world, their networks of self-protection and their ways of “shouldering” rebellion, they are developing the syndicalist feminism to come.

Carta(s) is a series of publications with which the Museo Reina Sofía seeks to broaden, through the publishing format, some of the debates that take place in the institution and beyond its walls, granting visibility to initiatives propelled or embraced by the Museo’s different lines of research and its artistic and critical productions. The presentation of this new publication takes the form of an encounter between the authors of the texts (Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and María Rosón), sociologist and feminist archivist Javiera Manzi and artist and cultural critic Marcelo Expósito. 

The collective imaginary and information around the propagation and spread of COVID-19 have radically changed the way we relate to one another, so much so that we perceive encounters with others as a threat. 

Like the Palm of My Hand seeks to illuminate new forms of doing from the digital sphere to reflect on virtual possibilities in cultural institutions. 

In the current social climate, the existence of political and cultural forces which appear to be handed down from fascism and historical extreme right movements are today a tangible reality. These forces call into question the continued existence of consolidated emancipatory conquests after centuries of struggle. The programme The New Reaction. Antidotes and Synergies sets out to explore and pinpoint the means that mobilise these forces, understanding the place from which they emanate, the designated enemies and why they are so, and the differences and similitudes they reveal in different geographies.

In a collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the Spanish premiere of Scorpion and Felix, a work by Buenos Aires-based La Columna Durruti, an iconoclastic collective carrying out performance actions and made up of Emilio García Wehbi, Maricel Álvarez, Marcelo Martínez, Julieta Potenze, Martín Antuña, among others.