Film and Video

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ongoing programme of film premieres, Intervals, shows recent works made either during the year in progress or the previous one. This fresh edition is devoted to Charlotte Wells (Scotland, 1987), 2022’s standout film-maker for her debut feature Aftersun (2022), a beautiful and melancholy reflection on family relationships, the real and imaginary dimension of memories and the passing of time.

In 2022, a group of people from Entrar Afuera, Nada Colectivo and Museo en Red embarked upon a research process on community mental health, critical institutionalism and the possibility of radio as a practice of collective communication. Therefore, the confluence of these three strands sets forth a hypothesis on cultural practice as a potential space for care and social transformation, inside the framework of structural forms of malaise rooted in the capitalist system.

The Museo Reina Sofía screens Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman’s (Brussels, 1950 – Paris, 2015) classic and widely acclaimed film. The screening is presented by Laura Mulvey, an historian and feminist film theorist and author of the essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Film Narrative’, first published the same year as Akerman’s film was released.   

Setting out from the exhibition Evil Eye: The Parallel History of Optics and Ballistics, held at Tabakalera Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea (Donostia-San Sebastián), this seminar aims to trace a history of the development of modern technology, punctuating ideas around vision and cognition. 

This latest edition of Interval presents Eami (2022), a film by Paz Encina (Paraguay, 1971) which, through magic realism, narrates the Indigenous conception of the world and the massacre of nature at the hands of financial exploitation. The film won the Tiger Award for Best Feature Film at the 51^st International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The 24^th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 23 and 24 February 2023. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

In conjunction with the restoration of Sambizanga(1973–1974), a key work among the political films made in Africa, this double session is structured around the French film-maker of African origins Sarah Maldoror (Gers, 1929 – Paris, 2020).

This congress analyses the different levels and dynamics of confrontation employed by forms of militarised communication on their path to permeating social life and manipulating the collective experience of the present.

In conjunction with 8M, the Museo organises a transversal programme with a focus on feminisms which, intersected by new present-day demands — the right to health and housing, climate justice — continue to call out different forms of violence that persist in today’s society as they interweave complicities and affection to make new horizons possible.

This conversation, open to the public, explores the tradition of literary analysis from a social perspective in a Hispanic context, welcoming three speakers and a moderator from university institutions and the sphere of publishing to discuss this key book in the tradition of Spanish literature.

The Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning Study Group is articulated around six sessions grouped into two blocks, whereby artists and researchers who work in different fields of knowledge — Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Marwa Arsanios, Rebecca Collins, María García Ruiz, Germán Labrador, José Antonio Sánchez, Alejandro Simón and Leire Vergara — are invited to share their investigations, readings, experiences and artworks, with the aim of cultivating a terrain of reflection and debate around mourning.

This new edition of Documents recovers the work of female cartoonists such as Montse Clavé, Ana Miralles, Núria Pompeia and Mariel Soria, and serves as a prelude to a document-based show on the same theme, to be held in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre in 2023. 

This encounter, conducted by Sara Buraya, coordinator of Museo en Red in the Museo, and activist Rafaela Pimentel, brings together activist women over mental health as they reflect on these issues from their own experiences.

Since December 2022, via the programme Perturbable School II, seminars on political violence and institutions, the work of Margarita Azurdia, and other situated voices, this Temporary Intensity Zone raises questions around the illness and healing of the institutions that shape us and the bodies with which we traverse and make them.

The programme Free Unions is structured around a series of events, surveys and activations in the rooms of Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881–2021, the new rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This particular edition activates Room 103.11 devoted to artist Rosa Barba and her work Bending to Earth (2015), a 35mm film installation which explores nuclear waste and the way in which it radically transforms the landscape

This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.

The company Teatro Sin Papeles (Undocumented Theatre) presents Las latinas son… (Latin Women Are…) in the Museo, inside the framework of proposals by the Museo Situado assembly.

A framework that encompasses successive crises which shape the present sociopolitical context and consequences that start to become embedded — constant price hikes, high temperature warnings, a dearth of resources, new and ever-closer military interventions — raises questions over the exact crisis we are facing. And if the current model is exhausted, what is our future?

The sinking of the Prestige in 2002 demonstrated how the majority of contemporary environmental disasters give rise to significant mobilisations of mutual aid and demands in the places where they occur. In this four-day encounter, different researchers, artists, activists and citizens reflect on the relations between ecology, memory and democracy today. The programme revolves around four axes: environmental traditions stretching from the anti-Francoist struggle to the present; memory and citizen creativity following the Prestige oil spill; authoritarian threats that loom from the depletion of fossil fuels; and controversies around imaginable futures.

Participants will work together to create and produce a novel written collectively — customarily an individual endeavour — addressing not only the writing process but also other tasks such as editing, correcting and disseminating a text. By the same token, and in the form of a coda, the workshop will explore the performative nature of the collective novel with a public presentation in different spaces inside the Museo.

This lecture sees Ferreira da Silva examine contemporary works and artistic practices which call into question that which she calls the “transparent I”, a concept which references the modern subject hailing from the Enlightenment and customarily adopted in the position of spectator.

Unending love or love dies, on repeat like it's endless is a choreography which explores relationships between desire, dance, fragmentation, love (understood as communality), mourning and time. Through the gesture, sensuality, relationality and touch, Baczyński-Jenkins’s practice unfurls structures and politics of desire.

The Museo organises Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, a double programme which is part of the 40^th Autumn Festival of Madrid. The first part features the performance of Monument 0.6: Heterochrony, a stage piece by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon, who creates an imaginary scene between past and present.

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning is the title under which a set of activities are set in motion around the echo of activities celebrating All Souls Day with a programme of live arts, before continuing with a study group under the same name. It seeks to open up a dialogue around mourning as a human process of loss and mourning established by the world through reflections from artistic forms of expression, social movements and environmental activism.

From different areas of society — particularly in relation to women and feminist movements — there is a demand for every political, economic and social stratum to embark upon a transition towards truly and effectively establishing an equal society. Moderated by Ángeles González-Sinde, this round-table discussion seeks to explore these issues in greater depth via the experience of three leading figures who, through their work, approach gender equality in culture from different viewpoints.

Museo Reina Sofía presents a new edition of the anthological film series co- organized with the Filmoteca Española since 2016. This edition charts the work of thirty-four women filmmakers from fifteen Eastern European countries made between 1943 and 1993 and includes titles from such prominent figures as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, Evelyn Schmidt, and Binka Zhelyazkova, among others.

Three years on from its first edition, the Second International Feminist Encounter on the Witch-hunt. Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence Against Women continues by retrieving the memory of women accused of being witches and hounded and murdered in the Early Modern Period, and analysing mechanisms used for such purposes which persist today.

Inside the framework of Madrid Otra Mirada (Another View of Madrid), the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre Department and its Architecture, Sustainable Development and General Services Area put forward two events which look to approach and delve deeper into knowledge around the institution’s rich cultural heritage.