Cinema and Video

Songs of the Contemporary Social War is the title of a pamphlet made by Guy Debord, signed anonymously under the pseudonym “Some iconoclasts” and dated May 1981.

Between August and September 2015, Pablo Sanz conducted fieldwork in the Amanã and Mamirauá reserves in Brazil’s central Amazon. These recordings make up the material that forms entangled, a project that folds out into a series of multi-channel, ambisonic installations, events and concerts adapted to the place in which they are set up. 

Research into the archives of Garage Pemasa, Fast Food and Off Limits that make up the document-based show What Are We Doing Here? Alternative Spaces in Madrid at the Turn of the Century has given rise to a series of questions related to the construction of collective spaces and artistic practices as meeting points. 

In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.

To conclude this new edition of the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair, Judith Butler gives a lecture on the idea of memory outside hegemonic readings of history, drawing from mottos/slogans, poems, posters, excerpts from texts, and materials that look to concisely transmit something lost from the past.

The Museo Reina Sofía devotes a month of its audiovisual programme to the history of film on art, organising a series that pivots on a set of formal lines stretching back to the 1920s. 

Recent times have witnessed an outbreak of diverse social uprisings on a global scale (Hong King, Barcelona, Quito, Beirut, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile) to protest against the regime of inequality and social injustice established by neoliberal hegemony.

For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies.

Curated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair articulates different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. This programme of analysis and reflection — put together at the crossroads between the aesthetic, the theoretical, the critical and the political — conceives of memory as an agent with which to decipher and re-read incomplete narratives, the fragments and scenes of which continue to question the present.

By way of documentaries and essay films, this series sets forth different ways of approaching memory to explore the different zones of conflict between subjectivity and politics; between militancy and revolutions; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between memory and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent the present.

Llorenç Barber (Aielo de Malferit, 1948), one of the major reference points in sound experimentation, is the focus of the Museo Reina Sofía’s reacquaintance with live music in an open-air concert for “flying bells” that make the Doppler effect audible as they swing.

Eden, Eden, Eden could be seen as a dramaturgy, in which characters’ movements are sketched on a feverish set. Everything seems to be there for somebody to choreograph the type of unique phrase which happens in a seemingly unique stage space. The Choreography is executed with reading.   

Museo Reina Sofía organiza este coloquio en memoria de Antonio Bonet Correa (La Coruña, 1925-Madrid, 2020), fallecido el pasado mayo, donde se abordan las relaciones que este insigne historiador del arte mantuvo con la teoría y la crítica del arte contemporáneo en España y las corrientes artísticas del momento.

Lettrism and Situationism were two intellectual and artistic movements that foreshadowed the transcendence of the idea of the avant-garde. This series, therefore, joins both movements across three blocks: Lettrism, Guy Debord and René Viénet.      

We Are All Old. We Are All Mortal is an invitation to consider how we want to age, an opportunity to analyse different alternatives and underline the right to live and die with dignity.

The Virus in Fortress Europe sets out an open conversation between social agents that gather diverse experiences and foreground the lives, in these times of pandemic, of migrant people who are blocked, ill-treated and crowded together at Europe’s internal and external borders, the problems they face and their resistance.

Uncertain Times III. Sustaining Lives, the third instalment comprising the summer cinema, is devoted to possible futures in this new period. Held for the first time in the Sabatini Garden and split into two themed weekly sessions, it orbits around the world we are gingerly returning to and the challenges and questions it raises.

The Museo sets in motion a new format of expanded mediation: The Film Society. The initiative will accompany exhibitions with a predominance of audiovisual language, setting forth a framework to view, in groups, different materials and think collectively.

Amid the deeply unusual context brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the LGTBIQ+ Pride celebration by examining the legacies of sexual and gender dissidence.

The Museo’s usual film and video programme was brought to a standstill on 12 March of this year by the COVID-19 health emergency, along with all its other on-site activities. Thus, Uncertain Times is an audiovisual series designed to be viewed on the Museo Reina Sofía website during such an atypical situation. This second part explores the representation of the pandemic over three online sessions and a fourth celebrating the reopening of the Sabatini Auditorium.

Surviving Together. Community Organisation in Times of Pandemic sets out to constitute a reflection based on an open conversation around specific forms of resistance, cooperation, self-management, and community solidarity in different places framed in the context of the capitalist crisis and the current health emergency.

The Glossary of Common Knowledge is a project of the European confederation of museums L’Internationale started in 2014 and organized cross-sectionally from working seminars and public conferences.

This special programme, organised in conjunction with International Museum Day, melds the lines of work developed by the Museo Reina Sofía with the contours of a timeline of interventions which places care and the sustainability of life as an inescapable ethical priority. Taking Care of Ourselves is an ongoing action about ourselves and others, a proposal with which to put forward initiatives to question this emergency present.

In mid-March of this year, Zelko had planned to carry out a series of actions and presentations in Madrid in collaboration with Museo Situado, a network made up of different collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, and the Museo Reina Sofía.

The existence of political and cultural forces which seem to be handed down from fascism and historical extreme right movements are today a tangible reality. These forces call into question the continued existence of consolidated emancipatory conquests after centuries of struggle. 

The Museo Reina Sofía and Fundación Arquia present a monographic exhibition on architect José María García de Paredes (Seville, 1924 – Madrid, 1990), in a contribution which aims to disseminate and promulgate Spanish contemporary architecture.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian José Emilio Burucúa (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1946) to participate in its programme of master lectures. In this programme, via a seminar and a lecture, Burucúa, a tireless advocate of the humanities and with a perspective that is as erudite as it is imaginative, seeks to recover an historical discourse capable of revealing the way in which the core principles of civilisations.

In a proposal by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network), Museo Situado, a network of collaboration between different collectives from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and Museo Reina Sofía, has organised this new edition of Situated Voices as part of the 8 March demonstrations.

With 8M on the horizon, two key questions have led Bolivian artist, writer and activist María Galindo to develop a performance in the Museo: What are our horizons in feminist struggle? What or from where do we speak about when we are situated as feminists?

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

In conjunction with ARCOmadrid 2020, the Museo Reina Sofía has organised an encounter among different professionals from museum institutions, both in Europe and Latin America, in order to create synergies, promote institutional collaboration and set forth a critical reflection on the role museums must play in relation to the society that promotes them.

The Documents programme, which explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice, pays homage in this edition to Guy Schraenen (1941–2018).

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a retrospective on one of the vital artists and thinkers of our time: film-maker Jean-Luc Godard (1930). The series spotlights his twenty-first-century productions and his ventures into the potential of the digital image, where film is rewritten as a present-day art.

After the Event focuses on the progression of the social uprisings that occurred between 2010 and 2013. From Turkey to Spain, Greece, Syria and Egypt, the locations of this unrest, the movements shook existing political systems and, at times, even brought them to their knees.

This new edition of the Intervals programme centres on two recent films which explore how to make cinema by experimenting with performance and with the role and purpose of the actor. The programme is made up of Un diálogo circunstancial (A Circumstantial Dialogue, 2019), the second film by artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, co-directed with film-maker and historian Luis Deltell, and Derechos del hombre (Rights of Man, 2018), a feature-length film by Juan Rodrigáñez, made in collaboration with a group of artists and performers.

Happy Lamento is the latest film by Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, Germany, 1932), one of the great intellectuals and film-makers of our time, made in collaboration with Philippine film-maker and enfant terrible Khavn de la Cruz (Quezon City, 1972).

The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre inaugurates a study area on photography, by Jorge Ribalta, that aims to encourage photographic studies by following a social and cultural focus. This programme, developed through a broad array of activities — seminars, lectures, guided tours, encounters— also seeks to put in place a network between different focal points of research, with national and international scope, to work towards shaping a discursive public sphere on photography and its theories, practices and history.

Over the past 30 years, World AIDS Day has been commemorated on 1 December. During this period, the protests, struggles and actions related to what life with HIV entails have varied, depending on the different stages of the AIDS crisis.

O que arde (Fire Will Come, 2019) takes centre stage in this edition of Intervals, a series devoted to screening recent film productions. The film, a story of containment and the wish for destruction based on the life of an arsonist, won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes 2019. Its director, Oliver Laxe, will present the first session and hold a talk after the screening.

Inside the framework of Museo Situado, a network of collaboration with different migrant collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and the Museo Reina Sofía, this new edition of Situated Voices explores the different artistic and feminist approaches to the notion of debt, understood as an instrument of economic, political and cultural domination.