Film and Video

This fresh edition of Interval presents El agua (Water, 2022), a feature film by Elena López Riera (Spain, 1982), accompanied by Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), a short film on the ritual and attraction of daily rural life. López Riera, with a filmography straddling gruesome realism and magical thinking, has established herself as one of the most original voices in new Spanish cinema. 

Inside the Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023 programme, and in one unique session, Guernica: el último exiliado (Guernica: The Last Exile) is screened, a documentary film centred on the iconic mural’s arrival in Spain seven months after the coup d’état attempt in 1981. In this instance, it is presented by its director, Guillermo Logar, and features a conversation with Genoveva Tussell and Álvaro Martínez-Novillo.

 Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is a workshop to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

In recent months, citizen demonstrations have exposed the dismal situation felt, for a number of years now, in the rooms of hospitals and medical centres across the Spanish State: public healthcare is in danger. Its clear demise, resulting from the progressive neglect of the country’s public authorities since the economic crisis in 2008, has intensified since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately damaging the pillars of a public model recognised the world over.

Project 30. Sketches of Heights is a site-specific performance which reflects, through a collective footprint and oral storytelling, on the memory of women during Franco’s dictatorship. It stems from research — conducted in Madrid during July of 2022 — into thirty women who explored the body at once as a wound and as a territory of resistance.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 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.

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. 

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.