Activities

This edition of Documents surveys the lesser-examined side of Pablo Picasso: as a poet. The visual, sound and performance quality of his poetry is deepened in the dialogue between text, sound and image, elements that form the backbone of the activity, structured around a performance recital of a selection of poems — with a new Spanish translation by Jèssica Jaques Pi — followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an editor and expert in Picasso’s literary work, and members of the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Italian artists Yervant Gianikian (Merano, 1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Rome, 1942–2018) are both pivotal figures in avant-garde cinema, their work centred on films and filmic, compilation-based installations which explore the twentieth-century’s major wars and the ideologies that occasion them. This programme is a retrospective with the catastrophe of war as its fulcrum and includes the international premiere of the artists’ last film Frente a Guernica (In Front of Guernica, 2023).

Joseph Morder (Trinidad and Tobago, 1949) is a film-maker and diarist whose Super-8 films are a monument to experimentation and film as a way of life. This programme, comprising three, single-screening sessions, unveils three of his films on the city of Madrid and its people, neighbourhoods, history and lives: Niños, niñas (Malasaña) (Boys, Girls [Malasaña], 1978), L’Été madrilène (The Madrid Summer, 1978) and La Gran Vía de Rita Jones (The Gran Vía of Rita Jones, 1996). The film-maker will be in attendance at all three screenings.

In memory of Carlos Saura (1932–2023), this programme screens two films: Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk, 2022), the film-maker’s final work centred on artistic impulses that extend from pre-historic cave painting to contemporary graffiti, and Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry! 1980), one of Saura’s early films and a major landmark in his oeuvre.

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.

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites Alexandra T. Vázquez, an associate professor of NYU’s Institute of Performing Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts, to participate in its programme of master lectures. The programme for this edition includes a seminar and a lecture concerning music’s relationship with different experiences, objects and spaces, and also the methods, modes and approaches around what we feel we know about the visual.

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.

This drift seeks to retrieve the sounds, attitudes and different forms of experiencing the city that shared time and space with this early bohemia via cuplés. The cuplé was conceived as a music genre with a double form: at once iconoclastic, transgressive and sexual and with empowered and feminist lyrics, as well as a mise en scène linked to the absurdism and nonsensicality of Dadaism and its cabaret scenes.

The Museo Reina Sofía screens There Is Nothing to Understand Here, a documentary on artist Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940 — Azpirotz, Navarra, 2015), along with two of her unreleased short digital animation films. The documentary, made by Javi Álvarez and Olga Sevillano and produced by the Museo, is shown for the first time in Madrid following its international premiere at the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Navarra and a brief online viewing in May and June 2020.

On this occasion, different specialist voices with an interest in the work of Maruja Mallo engage in conversation about her output following her return from exile and explore a selection of her late works, made from 1975 to 1982, conserved in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian José Emilio Burucúa (Buenos Aires, 1946) to conduct a seminar devoted to the cultural history of hope and a master lecture on man-nature relationships by means of artistic representations of the elephant.

Tomàs Llorens (1936–2021), a key figure of art history and Spain’s museum landscape, passed away on 10 June this year in Dénia. His professional activity was decisive in founding the most salient modern art museums in Spain at the beginning of the democratic period. This homage features a pre-eminent selection of interventions — both in-person and online – by figures linked to curatorship, art history, architecture and fine arts, all of which are representative of the professional and intellectual interests of Tomàs Llorens.

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. 

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 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.

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.