Film and Video

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.

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?

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

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.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, this conference addresses the language of Chilean arpilleras (burlap works), an exercise of reflection, denouncement and memory developed by groups of women in the dictatorship years. The activity is structured around a conversation on Conflict Textiles’ collection of arpilleras conducted by its founder Roberta Bacic and researcher Marina Vinyes; a symbolic handover ceremony of a series of five Conflict Textiles arpilleras acquired by the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation in 2023; and, as a coda, an arpilleras workshop led by Pilar López and Roser Corbera from the arpilleras group of the Fundació Ateneu Sant Roc (Badalona).

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.

Following the tide that swept through the streets during the 8M Strikes in 2018 and 2019, linked to the resurgence of a feminist internationalism, in April 2019 a hundred or so people gathered in a space in Madrid to debate the situation facing the movement. A year later, the conversation continued in Barcelona, with double the number of participants. Both encounters set out the need to delve deeper into new feminist debates from a non-identity, inclusive and diverse perspective, forming the grounds for the publication Alianzas rebeldes [Rebel Alliances] (Bellaterra, 2021).

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.