Film and Video

Songs of the Contemporary Social War is the title of a pamphlet made by Guy Debord, signed anonymously under the pseudonym “Some iconoclasts” and dated May 1981.

The Museo Reina Sofía takes part in the 15^th edition of Book Night, an initiative organised by the Community of Madrid to promote reading and grant visibility to the activities of different cultural centres and institutions inside this sphere.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents, in a collaboration with the Oslo Biennial (2019–2024), Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project in which people from different countries learn books of their choice by heart. Together they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated points, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.  

Between August and September 2015, Pablo Sanz conducted fieldwork in the Amanã and Mamirauá reserves in Brazil’s central Amazon. These recordings make up the material that forms entangled, a project that folds out into a series of multi-channel, ambisonic installations, events and concerts adapted to the place in which they are set up. 

Every autumn since 2016, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española have organised an audiovisual season which combines, over a two-month period, the film programmes of both institutions. The 2020 retrospective shines a light on Derek Jarman (1942–1994), painter, film-maker, gay rights activist, stage designer, writer and gardener.

The Museo’s Education Area sets in motion a series of actions, listening journeys, encounters and mediation projects to accompany and amplify these exhibitions, inviting participation for anyone interested in absorbing and reflecting on sounds to form a diverse group of hearers and listeners that can, at the same time, transmit back their experiences and impressions.

Museo Reina Sofía and the cooperative Mbolo Moy Dole organise two weekly dance and theatre workshops conducted by teacher Deisy Mesías García, whereby female domestic workers approach movement in a way that expands beyond its functional value and work.

Over the course of six encounters, the study group Body, Territory and Conflict seeks to develop a space of action and thought focused on the critique of the so-called Anthropocene, a geological era defined by growing and destructive human intervention on the planet.

The crisis brought on by the pandemic continues to highlight the need to urgently drive forward a programme of interpreters-mediators equipped with enough resources and the capacity to operate constantly and effectively in languages such as Bengali, Wolof, Urdu, Arabic, Bambara, Tagalog and Chinese in all spheres of society, where necessary.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.  

ESTUDIO in Conversation is an encounter which makes up part of the second edition of ESTUDIO, “Half Said, Unsaid”, a programme which brings together the enquiries of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.  

Time is a project which, through the collective production of an experimental film, explores the intangible, and the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers, delving deeper into different works from the Collection.

In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.

To conclude this new edition of the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair, Judith Butler gives a lecture on the idea of memory outside hegemonic readings of history, drawing from mottos/slogans, poems, posters, excerpts from texts, and materials that look to concisely transmit something lost from the past.

The Museo Reina Sofía devotes a month of its audiovisual programme to the history of film on art, organising a series that pivots on a set of formal lines stretching back to the 1920s. 

Museo Reina Sofía joins up with Red Interlavapiés (The Interlavapiés Network) to organise a small Spanish Language School for migrant residents in the Community of Madrid who require knowledge and use of the local language as a tool for day-to-day communication, work and involvement in society.  

Recent times have witnessed an outbreak of diverse social uprisings on a global scale (Hong King, Barcelona, Quito, Beirut, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile) to protest against the regime of inequality and social injustice established by neoliberal hegemony.

For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies.

Curated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair articulates different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. This programme of analysis and reflection — put together at the crossroads between the aesthetic, the theoretical, the critical and the political — conceives of memory as an agent with which to decipher and re-read incomplete narratives, the fragments and scenes of which continue to question the present.

By way of documentaries and essay films, this series sets forth different ways of approaching memory to explore the different zones of conflict between subjectivity and politics; between militancy and revolutions; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between memory and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent the present.

Llorenç Barber (Aielo de Malferit, 1948), one of the major reference points in sound experimentation, is the focus of the Museo Reina Sofía’s reacquaintance with live music in an open-air concert for “flying bells” that make the Doppler effect audible as they swing.

Eden, Eden, Eden could be seen as a dramaturgy, in which characters’ movements are sketched on a feverish set. Everything seems to be there for somebody to choreograph the type of unique phrase which happens in a seemingly unique stage space. The Choreography is executed with reading.   

Museo Reina Sofía organiza este coloquio en memoria de Antonio Bonet Correa (La Coruña, 1925-Madrid, 2020), fallecido el pasado mayo, donde se abordan las relaciones que este insigne historiador del arte mantuvo con la teoría y la crítica del arte contemporáneo en España y las corrientes artísticas del momento.

Actions such as this one undertaken by collectives comprising the Museo Situado network enable visibility to be granted to the constant collective strength that seeks to resolve urgent issues that arise, both in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and in other areas of the Community of Madrid.   

Lettrism and Situationism were two intellectual and artistic movements that foreshadowed the transcendence of the idea of the avant-garde. This series, therefore, joins both movements across three blocks: Lettrism, Guy Debord and René Viénet.      

We Are All Old. We Are All Mortal is an invitation to consider how we want to age, an opportunity to analyse different alternatives and underline the right to live and die with dignity.

The Virus in Fortress Europe sets out an open conversation between social agents that gather diverse experiences and foreground the lives, in these times of pandemic, of migrant people who are blocked, ill-treated and crowded together at Europe’s internal and external borders, the problems they face and their resistance.

Uncertain Times III. Sustaining Lives, the third instalment comprising the summer cinema, is devoted to possible futures in this new period. Held for the first time in the Sabatini Garden and split into two themed weekly sessions, it orbits around the world we are gingerly returning to and the challenges and questions it raises.

The Museo sets in motion a new format of expanded mediation: The Film Society. The initiative will accompany exhibitions with a predominance of audiovisual language, setting forth a framework to view, in groups, different materials and think collectively.

The Museo’s usual film and video programme was brought to a standstill on 12 March of this year by the COVID-19 health emergency, along with all its other on-site activities. Thus, Uncertain Times is an audiovisual series designed to be viewed on the Museo Reina Sofía website during such an atypical situation. This second part explores the representation of the pandemic over three online sessions and a fourth celebrating the reopening of the Sabatini Auditorium.

Amid the deeply unusual context brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the LGTBIQ+ Pride celebration by examining the legacies of sexual and gender dissidence.

Surviving Together. Community Organisation in Times of Pandemic sets out to constitute a reflection based on an open conversation around specific forms of resistance, cooperation, self-management, and community solidarity in different places framed in the context of the capitalist crisis and the current health emergency.

The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a project of the European confederation of museums L’Internationale started in 2014 and organized cross-sectionally from working seminars and public conferences.

The Museo Reina Sofía premieres an internally produced online documentary on the artist Elena Asins, resulting from research into the artist’s archive conducted over a two-year period, and assembling unpublished documents and unprecedented interpretations around one of the key figures in geometric abstraction and art as research since 1960.

In mid-March of this year, Zelko had planned to carry out a series of actions and presentations in Madrid in collaboration with Museo Situado, a network made up of different collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, and the Museo Reina Sofía.

This special programme, organised in conjunction with International Museum Day, melds the lines of work developed by the Museo Reina Sofía with the contours of a timeline of interventions which places care and the sustainability of life as an inescapable ethical priority. Taking Care of Ourselves is an ongoing action about ourselves and others, a proposal with which to put forward initiatives to question this emergency present.

The Museo Reina Sofía and Fundación Arquia present a monographic exhibition on architect José María García de Paredes (Seville, 1924 – Madrid, 1990), in a contribution which aims to disseminate and promulgate Spanish contemporary architecture.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian José Emilio Burucúa (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1946) to participate in its programme of master lectures. In this programme, via a seminar and a lecture, Burucúa, a tireless advocate of the humanities and with a perspective that is as erudite as it is imaginative, seeks to recover an historical discourse capable of revealing the way in which the core principles of civilisations.

In a proposal by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network), Museo Situado, a network of collaboration between different collectives from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and Museo Reina Sofía, has organised this new edition of Situated Voices as part of the 8 March demonstrations.

With 8M on the horizon, two key questions have led Bolivian artist, writer and activist María Galindo to develop a performance in the Museo: What are our horizons in feminist struggle? What or from where do we speak about when we are situated as feminists?

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

In conjunction with ARCOmadrid 2020, the Museo Reina Sofía has organised an encounter among different professionals from museum institutions, both in Europe and Latin America, in order to create synergies, promote institutional collaboration and set forth a critical reflection on the role museums must play in relation to the society that promotes them.

The Documents programme, which explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice, pays homage in this edition to Guy Schraenen (1941–2018).