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 edition turns its attentions towards cavities, both mental and physical, that open in our bodies after the passing-through of other bodies. As porous beings we live in constant relations and exchange with others, not only because we are social, or because we inhabit the planet — filled with other living beings — but because we are the planet. And its history. As part of this planet-being, the proposals in this edition of ESTUDIO take on a poetic responsibility, with Ola Maciejewska, Josu Bilbao and Paz Rojo assaying material forms that are poetic, physical and anatomical, and which entail passing through knowledge knowing that results are not guaranteed.

This activity presents a screening of the feature-length documentary Orlando, mi biografía política (Orlando. My Political Biography, 2023), by the philosopher and writer Paul B. Preciado, and features an intervention, in the second session, by the artist, writer and poet Roberta Marrero, the author of El bebé verde: infancia, transexualidad y héroes del pop (Lunwerg Editores, 2016) and Todo era por ser fuego. Poemas de chulos, trans y travestis (Continta me tienes, 2022).

This encounter screens the video installation Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para un tiempo trans (A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time, 2022), by artist duo Cabello/Carceller, a work recently acquired by the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. It also features a presentation by the writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, the author of the novel Las niñas del naranjel (The Girls from the Orange Grove, Penguin Random House, 2023) on Catalina/Antonio de Erauso.

Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network, Archives of the Commons is a bi-annual encounter which arises from the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces where memories gestate and are cared for. The aim is to open up opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as sounding out experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, exercises of imagination and critique which are key to articulating and constructing narratives of memory in resistance.

In a session set up as half workshop, half relational theatre and a ghostly escape room, the activity becomes an immersive experience encompassing teaching, play and popular culture. All starting from the premise: If there’s something strange in your library, who’re you going to call?

Film-maker and activist Philip Rizk looks over the key junctures in his artistic and personal trajectory, via an encounter and a workshop, to reflect on how the moving image weaves affective communities and collective forms of utterance. Rizk experiments with different techniques in his films that range from performance or the limits between fiction and documentary to the found footage montage, with a view to making the habitual strange and posing the question: How do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?

This conference examines the historical relationship between colonialism, authoritarianism and fossil fuels from the spheres of ecological and energy humanities.

The lecture series Picasso 1906. The Turning Point is articulated around the same-titled exhibition held in the Museo from 15 November 2023 to 4 March 2024. The programme brings together eminent international specialists such as Eugenio Carmona, Cécile Debray, Tamar Garb, Jèssica Jaques Pi, Patricia Leighten and Robert Lubar, among others, with a view to surveying Picasso’s origins through a contemporary gaze.

This thirtieth edition of Situated Voices addresses the housing problem via the neighbourhood collectives GRIGRI and Lavapiés, ¿dónde vas?, along with Museo Situado. With its gaze fixed on the nearby Lavapiés neighbourhood and in connection with other areas and territories, a conversation is set out from a place of urgency and around collective alternatives to the current predatory and individualistic real estate model.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, the encounter Chile or Utopian Imagination: On Democracy as Aesthetics examines, across two days, the Andean country’s cultural practices developed today from memories of the dictatorship.

Putting into practice a set of collective and personal rituals through different sessions, the laboratory seeks to generate a temporary community which works with natural dyes, made traditionally with autochthonous plants from the Iberian Peninsula.

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española centre their joint annual film series on Peter Watkins (UK, 1935), one of the leading rebellious film-makers of our time who, through his work, sets forth a critique of the manipulation and standardisation of the mass media, and its compliance with the interests of powers governing the world, and holds the belief that documentary’s narrative and formal experimentation can lead us to being free and independent citizens.

Bodies that Are Not One. Fat Practices on the Border is a study group which aims to explore radical politics around fatness that have intensified within the context of the Spanish State’s territories, making a series of fat utterances far-reaching and possible.

Within the framework of the Notes for a Time Apart programme, elii [oficina de arquitectura] and Orkan Telhan present the installation Still Remains, which, distanced from Anthropocentrism, sets forth research around the microbiome: the community of micro-organisms that inhabit a certain environment, both inside and outside the human body, and are governed by their own logics and temporal scales.