Film and Video

The 25th 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 7 and 8 March 2024. 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 latest edition will take place with a combination of in-person and virtual participation and features twenty-minute interventions, followed by five-minute Q&As.

This instalment centres on the work of draughtsman and cartoonist Chris Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 1967), one of the pre-eminent names in independent comics. Ware will also take part in a conversation and encounter with Carla Berrocal, Enrique Bordes and Raquel Jimeno.

The Nature Camera is a film series which gathers recent films in different genres — fiction, documentary, essay, experimental film — from different countries around the world, works with their gaze fixed on the relationship between the human and the non-human. 

This conference revises the present and past of aerial war by way of three case studies conducted by researchers and creators linked to history, photography, architecture and medicine.

This third edition is articulated around the artistic and discursive trajectory of Tim Etchells and his work with Forced Entertainment, a collective founded in Sheffield, England, in 1984 and made up of Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells as artistic director.

Alice Centamore y Christian Xatrec, comisarios de la exposición Llámalo de otra manera. Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974), proponen un recorrido por la muestra con el objetivo de acercarse a las prácticas artísticas que la editorial Something Else Press contribuyó a difundir en las décadas de 1960 y 1970: nuevas formas de creación que estuvieron basadas en el tiempo, el azar y el agenciamiento del público, como las de Fluxus y el arte conceptual.

This fresh edition shows the national premiere of Man in Black (2023) by Wang Bing (China, 1967), a documentary feature film on memory, truth and the power of music from the biography of composer Wang Xilin (China, 1936). The director will also present the film and participate in the conversation that follows the screening.

Developed by Fundación Gabeiras, Legacies. Spaces to Preserve Contemporary Creations is a project which seeks to analyse the situation of artistic legacies in the Spanish State from a social and legal perspective. It comes into being with the aim of drawing up a legal report to put forward solutions to a widespread problem of neglect in a state-wide context: the precarity of senior artists and safeguarding their contemporary legacies.

En el marco de la exposición maquinaciones, se lleva a cabo en el Museo un taller de sastrería en colaboración con agentes locales y un acto público de presentación del proyecto en el que se muestra algunas piezas confeccionadas en Trieste. Ambas actividades ahondan en la potencia de la cooperativa como máquina de reproducción social y sostén de la vida en común, a partir de la alianza entre colectivos que luchan por sus derechos.

José María Berzosa (Spain, 1928 — France, 2018) is a missing link in the history of Spanish cinema, his filmography, made entirely in France, characterised by the use of sarcasm and parody against despotic power. The documentary’s four episodes unmask the monstrosities of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, while also spotlighting film’s capacity to confront tyranny and represent the subjugated.

Bayanihan Re-existence is an installation conceived to welcome events and activities from the Notes for a Time Apart programme, inviting rest, reading and shared time to make the Palacio de Velázquez a more pleasant place for visitors.

Maximum Respect. Rap, Tapes and Photocopies sets forth a collective reflection on the origins and pathways of rap in Spain, and also serves to present the research project Proposals, Archives and Communities in the Origins of Rap in Spain, which aims to study, document and catalogue activities related to the self-management and self-release of Spanish rap from its beginnings.

This session, the fifth in the series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets out to explore the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. The activity looks to reflect on the difficulty, and urgency, of imagining a world after, or beyond, tourism, with the programme comprising a compendium of brief lectures and a subsequent presentation of specific case studies by architecture and urbanism teams involved in re-wilding environments affected by tourism exploitation.

This workshop, drawing from the machinations exhibition, creates and improves Wikipedia entries related to the show’s focal points — War Machines, Schizo Machines, Cinema Machines of Care — and some of the concepts related to works by the artists involved: the crisis of representation, micropolitics, deep ecology, social machines and cyborgs, among others.

This round-table discussion features the participation of Ballet Djédje, Demetrio Gómez, Elena Prous, Tatiana Romero Reina and Iki Yos Piña, the voices of different agents hit hard by the logics of hate and fear and who refuse to assume the role of victim that pushes them aside and threatens to absorb the energy and capacity to evolve and build other ways of relating. 

This new edition of the summer cinema is devoted to the monsters that inhabit our collective imaginary and customarily represent not only evil, but also the strange, the marginal and the maladjusted. Every Friday and Saturday throughout July and August, the series convenes a bestiary of vampires, witches and other special beings inside the Museo, a coven of deviants and dissidents to share historical phobias, cook up a rejection of the norm and offer an alternative, monstrous gaze through film.  

The Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre organise, in collaboration with PhotoBook Club Madrid, Harvest, an annual public encounter which presents photobook mock-ups and is open to creators of every stripe. Photobooks have now become one of the biggest vehicles of expression for contemporary photographic creation, with Harvest 2023 an encounter which looks to gauge and share current activity in this field.

In this multimedia stage piece, straddling monologue, confession and the activation of body and music, artist Frau Diamanda looks to explore the mutation of transvestite identity, punctuated by questions of class and race and affected by (neo)colonisation and hyperbolic exaltation.

The Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido (Institute of Suspended Time, ITS) is a project by Javier Bassas and Raquel Friera which came into being as a fictitious (non)institution seeking to revise temporal regimes established in society.

Notes is a new Museo Reina Sofía project which aims to explore other formats and methodologies to accommodate devices and projects which transversally make disciplines hybrid and ensure they are capable of working on processes from erraticism as a possibility.  

This latest edition includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter.

This fresh edition of the LGBTIAQ+ programme looks to explore the possibility of imaginatively and politically turning around the logics of hate and fear that run through us, socially raising questions around who personifies a non-normative sex-gender or body position.

The Museo’s Study Centre organises two public sessions based on the first edition of Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Programme of Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies. During the encounter, the team of mobilisers share the works developed up to this point and reflect on their predictions. Equally, the group of Resident Student Researchers present their work on posters and in installations and talks with people interested.

The exhibition Machinations traces the influence of the machine concept developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in contemporary art within the context following May ’68 in France. Pivotal to putting together the show has been the research work of a scientific committee made up of philosophers Gerald Raunig and Stevphen Shukaitis and cultural theorist Brigitta Kuster. In this round-table discussion, moderated by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, each guest will present their research. 

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges. This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience.

In her recent publications, art historian and curator Antonia Majaca has focused her research on the relations between the development of algorithmic computing regimes and their potential to build subjectivity. This lecture sees Majaca analyse the historical construction of optical regimes found at the root of Western cosmologies in studies on how the history of Western geology has been shaped, considering that such regimes of the gaze are found at the base of contemporary computational paradigms.

El Hierro is not any volcanic island. For centuries, it was considered prime meridian before being replaced by Greenwich Mean Time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. This occurred after the United Kingdom had standardised the measurement of time for the rest of the planet in 1840 via the Great Western Railway company. El Hierro, sitting halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents Western media’s powerful grid, which rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.

On 24 June 2022, at least forty people lost their lives on the border between Melilla and Morocco. Situated Voices 29 brings that dire event into focus without forgetting the preceding occurrences and the systemic violence which is still happening relentlessly at borders. The encounter seeks to foreground the voices of those people who escape suffering, injustice and cruelty, of lives on the brink, those who are politically and/or physically isolated outside European territory and are often forced to return to everything they escaped from.