Activities

Narcisa Hirsch is one of the foremost figures in the history of Latin American and international experimental film. Born in Germany in 1928, and living in Argentina since her childhood, her name has lurked in the shadows unduly, owing to a twofold “eccentricity”: being a woman and making films that lie outside central spaces constructing the history of this filmic modality: the United States and Europe.  

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.

Every autumn since 2016, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española have organised an audiovisual season which combines, over a two-month period, the film programmes of both institutions. The 2020 retrospective shines a light on Derek Jarman (1942–1994), painter, film-maker, gay rights activist, stage designer, writer and gardener.

Time is a project which, through the collective production of an experimental film, explores the intangible, and the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers, delving deeper into different works from the Collection.

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. 

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.

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.      

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’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.

The Museo Reina Sofía premieres an internally produced online documentary on the artist Elena Asins, resulting from research into the artist’s archive conducted over a two-year period, and assembling unpublished documents and unprecedented interpretations around one of the key figures in geometric abstraction and art as research since 1960.

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.

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.

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.