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, is 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.

José Rodríguez Soltero (Santurce, 1943 – New York, 2009) was an experimental film-maker whose productions were made across the 1960s and 1970s. His audiovisual work stands at the intersection of the avant-garde, queer representations and Latin culture from that era (specifically, Nuyoricans: Puerto Ricans living in New York). This film series screens all three and features presentations by Juan A. Suárez, a specialist in North American underground cinema, Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and protagonist in Dialogue with Che, and MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of the three works.

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

This encounter sees choreographer, dancer and dance researcher Olga de Soto (Valencia, 1972), alongside Lola Hinojosa, expand her reading of Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), an anti-war dance piece by German choreographer Kurt Jooss and the point of reference for the exhibition Reconstrucción de una danza macabra (Reconstruction of a Macabre Dance), a new stage production framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s Fissures programme. The encounter will be followed by the unveiling of the show.

This encounter, in conjunction with the exhibition What They Saw. Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, curated by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, seeks to reflect on the female gaze and the photobook, an artistic medium which has come to the fore in recent years, despite historiography and exhibitions continuing to favour male authorship. The activity comprises a conversation between the publisher Sonia Berger and the aforementioned editor Russet Lederman, followed by an intervention from the photographers Liza Ambrossio, Manuela Lorente and Lúa Ribeira.

“To every age its art; to every art its freedom”, reads the inscription on the façade of the Vienna Succession Pavilion. The same ideal runs through the Jeonju International Film Festival (South Korea), which, for over twenty years, has charted the film-making of our time by means of independently made productions. This series, therefore, compiles a selection of such films, many of which have never been shown in Spain, for the purposes of sketching a global map of today’s auteur cinema.

The centrepiece of this new edition is Mamántula (2023), by Ion de Sosa (Urnieta, Gipuzkoa, 1981), a fictional feature-length film on the freedom of desire which blends psychosexual thriller, gay porn and science fiction. The screening includes a presentation and talk by the director in both sessions.

The medium-length documentary Serigne vs the EU (2022) tells the story of Serigne Mbayé: a migrant fisherman who uses his own life experiences to shed light on Europe’s abusive fishing policies in African waters and the fight against institutional xenophobia before political leaders at the heart of the European Union. 

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.

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. 

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.

Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation.

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.