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.