Film and Video

This open day sees members of the Queer Malaise study group — developed in the Museo across September and October 2022 — share with those in attendance their experience-based and carnal, as well as intellectual and creative, exploration in the preceding weeks.

The activity is made up of a morning workshop — split into three groups with different access — which aims to raise awareness, through four stations based on the principles of four-colour printing, of the array of possibilities within the artist’s book, from its poetic beginnings with Mallarmé and Apollinaire to its more contemporary expressions.

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía participates for the first time in Spanish Film Day, an initiative of Spain’s Ministry of Culture which brings together screens and programmes from different institutions. In this edition, we retrieve a historical and pioneering work in international experimental film: ...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren...(1968–1970), made by artist José Antonio Sistiaga (San Sebastián, 1932). 

Twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige, this Temporary Intensity Zone calls upon the collective potential of a self-organised citizenry facing the life-threatening side of environmental disaster.

This fresh edition of the Free Unions programme invites Guatemalan artist Benvenuto Chavajay to carry out the performance Returning Souls (Popol Vuh [Wuj]). With the aim of activating memory to translate and transcribe the silence of his ancestors, Chavajay looks to “make Guatemala’s soul return by means of the healing and dignifying role of art, thereby bringing justice to history,” in his words.

This seminar reflects on how performative artistic practices are inserted inside a collection and its institutional framework. To spark this debate, an approach is set forth from different perspectives — theory, practice and ethics — convening voices from inside and outside the museum as an institution. A series of lectures and events with different artists, theorists, curators and researchers brings together different viewpoints and reflections around working conditions with performative works of art.

The Museo Reina Sofía continues with its annual welcomes toTime has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

Violence pervades queer people, who constantly face barriers to social structures which hinder and constrain the development of subjectivity and the free expression of affections and desires. In an era of widespread malaise, this vulnerability intensifies, often leading to a downward spiral of solitude, pathologisation and victimisation that is hard to evade. Queer Malaise seeks to share and politicise these situations, which isolate people and single them out, through tools that include dialogue, narration, make-up, performance and the collective production of images.

The Museo Reina Sofía and Cineteca Madrid jointly organise the second part, and conclusion, of the retrospective devoted to the films of Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) with the international premiere of one of contemporary cinema’s most ambitious projects: the production of eleven feature-length films made by the director between 2021 and 2022.

This TIZ reflects on ghostly relationships, the relationships of events with history, of citizens with politics, of inhabitants with the home or of the missing with those still waiting for them. In the month of the dead, we think about mourning and lamenting, memory and forgetting, and forms of presence and disappearance from the unique spectrality which the same idea of a museum imposes upon us.

As another summer comes around, the Museo moves its cinema outside and into the Sabatini Building. This fresh edition is centred on musical films, viewed at once as a genre which is both playful and high-spirited and also a discourse which incorporates striking ruptures in formats and narratives.    

Cerdas (Sows) depicts the problems and consequences that materialise when body worship fails. By way of a series of scenes and seemingly unconnected “re-performances”, Carlos García de la Vega, Rodrigo García Marina and Rocío Simón show the violence inherent in certain regulated spaces that prevent queer corporality.

French-Argentinian artist Alejandra Riera conducts, alongside artists Caroline Déodat, Andreas-Maria Fohr and Antonio Menchen, a workshop in different spaces of the Museo, setting out from notions which form the backbone of her and the participating artists’ work: communal art-making, the fragility of materials and themes and film as an open process.

The Chair of Situated Thought sets out to articulate different experiences, stances, methods and initiatives of critical thought as it seeks to underscore the singularities of an intellectual and artistic production that converses with social and political circumstances, and which aspires to have an impact on the specific conditions of its environment.

This day of lectures and encounters, the fourth instalment of the series organised by the inter-university group TURICOM, endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. By virtue of a selection of brief lectures and a final conversation, followed by a debate, it looks to reflect on mass tourism and the way in which, as the industry of experience, it is connected to the search for a lived experience that has shaped contemporary art.

This latest edition of Situated Voices features the screening of the documentary El delito de existir (The Crime of Existing, 2022), followed by a conversation on the protagonists’ experience after arriving in Spain. These participants include: Fabiola Barranco (a journalist specialised in migration and human rights), Cristina Bermejo (director of ONG Rescate) and three LGTBIQ+ refugees living in Spain: Alex, one of the documentary’s protagonists, Fabu and Ramtin Zigorat, the session’s moderator.

This fourth edition, concerning the relationship between coloniality and gender, tries to reflect on certain feminist approaches which manifest a posture of moral, authoritaria and exclusivist superiority, characteristics of the patriarchal episteme. This programme, in charge of Rita Segato and Elisa Fuenzalida — the director and coordinator of the Chair, respectively —, includes a seminar in which local transfeminist activists participate.

This second edition presents the artistic and political pathway taken by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, founded in Peru in 1971, and highlights some of the key moments in their long history to spark debates that remain present in Peruvian and Latin American cultural contexts, and in Spanish and European spheres.

Free Unions is a series of events, tours and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This edition activates Room 104.06. Luis Camnitzer: Puerto Montt Massacre, 1969 and Room 104.07. A Map Is Not a Place. Via performers Teresa Ralli and Jorge Tadeo Baldeón, from Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, active since 1971 in Peru, fragments of the collective’s artistic repertoire are set in relation to the memories formalised by other artists who have confronted similar political or social situations.

Harvest 2022 sets out to debate and reflect upon the editing and production of photobooks, inviting anyone immersed in the lay-out stage of a project to share their photographic work with the other participants.   

For the sixth year running, the Archipelago concert series invites the public to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening. This year, certain material questions are addressed which influence musical mutations, with the aim of providing a recap of what is learned on the common history of tradition and contemporary culture to reinterpret and update this discourse through forced migration, the transport of wood, metals and minerals and the importance of ports and old maritime routes in our listening.   

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forced migration of millions of people, particularly women and girls, has once again become a pressing issue that reignites the debate around human trafficking and the situations that cause it. This edition of Situated Voices looks to reflect on the different problems people being trafficked face, exploring the causes and consequences and stressing the urgent need to create public policies to support and protect them.

The Neighbourhood Picnic constitutes an annual opportunity to create a space where Lavapiés (Madrid) residents can come together in the Museo’s Garden. A place for everyone and part of the daily life of the neighbourhood in which it is situated.  

On this occasion, experimental duo Los Voluble put forward an audiovisual and sound exploration which reflects on 1992 and its implications in the cultural, social and political sphere of the country, drawing from archive material, electronic music and live cinema.

This programme, coinciding with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride, does not look to “thematise” a pathological situation. Rather, it sets out to demonstrate the power of admitting we ourselves are fragile and vulnerable, together with other lives shaken by persecution and exile. Nor does it seek to moralise on the positions and practices outside the norm, vindicating a greater capacity for agency of and over our bodies and sexual impulses, developed here through plastic, poetic, written and performative devices. 

Slumil K’ajxemk’op — which means “rebel land” in Tzotzil, a Mayan dialect — is how the Zapatista delegation renamed Europe during its visit to the continent in 2021. A gift for being aware of and recognising ourselves as part of another Europe “abducted” from itself, and which invites us to reinvent our ties to the past in an emancipatory mode of expression, to the point of returning our otherness to us: the non-suppressed condition.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986.

This seventh edition of Graphic Outbreak witnesses Delight Lab, in collaboration with Vórtice Creativo CIMA, seeking 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. Above all, this situation afflicts undocumented migrant people, who experience long waits and unpayable bills, putting their life at risk.

Graphic Outbreak 6. O Corpo como Poética da Luta is a workshop organised by Coletivo Alvorada and shines a light on the body, flash mobs and textiles as strategies to burst into public space.