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2 July, 2014 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 1. Expeditions
Signs of Empire
Colour, sound, 20’50’’, 1982-84. Original format: 35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. Distribution: Smoking Dogs FilmsImages of Nationality
Colour, sound, 22’44’’, 1982-84. Original format: 35mm slides, screening format: Blu-ray. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.Both film projects form Expeditions , Black Audio Film Collective’s inaugural work approached in two parts. Expeditions shares deliberated hermeticism and the use of allegory in art practices from the beginning of the 1980s. Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality both include familiar aspects in the collective’s work: the dimension of sound in the image, the audiovisual remix of archive and the use of text as collective writing. Signs of Empire draws from Roland Barthes and his Empire of Signs , resolving to show historical signs from colonialism, while Images of Nationality addresses the continuity of the myth of the nation.
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3 July, 2014 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Handsworth Songs
Colour, sound, 60’, 1986. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX.
At the beginning of 1985 a series of race riots and labour protests took place in Handsworth (Birmingham) and Brixton (London), culminating in the death of an elderly black woman and a white policeman. The film joins the civil unrest and a multiple story of dispossession, delving deeper into the roots of contradictions from the colonial past and connecting the economic and industrial crisis at the time. By using the traditions of reformist documentaries in Britain (John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright), together with archives of black presence (and absence) in the UK, Handsworth Songs concludes that any meaning has to be sought outside of news reporting. The Songs from the title does not refer to musicality in the film, but instead invokes an updated idea of documentary, devised as a poetic montage of associations.
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9 July, 2014 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. Twilight City
Colour, sound, 52’, 1989. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.
An epistolary documentary essay that narrates the story of a young girl in London who writes to her mother on the island of Dominica. Her letters recount the changes occurring in the city while the Docklands are being rebuilt as the film intersperses this social and psychological landscape of the city as a symbolic space in which the transformation of the urban panorama into financial affluence converges with the hopes and disappointments of African diaspora. This intimate space, with echoes of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, is imbued with debates on the public sphere, where sociologists, activists and historians draw up a new urban territory, mapped out by racial and cultural limits. A place with people existing in close proximity but living in different worlds, as Paul Gilroy remarks.
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10 July, 2014 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. Who Needs a Heart
Colour, sound, 78’, 1991. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: LUX.
This film, produced by Channel Four, explores the history of British Black Power by means of the blurred figure of Michael Abdul Malik, the predominant counter-culture anti-hero and activist in the movement. Nevertheless, the narration keeps its distance from this historical figure and traces his biography from radio and television documents, complemented with the lives of other participants in the movement. Trevor Mathison’s soundtrack is arranged to produce a deliberate estrangement with the images, and Who Needs a Heart sets out a fragmented narration that flashes back and jumps forward, bringing in fiction as a postcolonial chamber theatre, in the words of Kobena Mercer, supporting itself with music, the street and art to reclaim the genealogy of blackness.
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16 July, 2014 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 5. The Last Angel of History
The Last Angel of History
Colour, sound, 45’, 1995. Original format: 16mm film, screening format: Betacam Digital. Distribution: Smoking Dogs Films.One of the collective’s last and most influential film essays, The Last Angel of History concentrates its combination of interests in a highly complex and disparate manner. Located between critical theory and science fiction, the Data Thief, a version from Walter Benjamin’s story, played by Edward George (a member of the collective), travels into the past to assemble fragments of information that will enable him to decipher the future. The cosmic journey and alien iconography prevalent in the music of Sun Ra, Lee Perry and George Clinton is interpreted as a metaphor of diaspora and the otherness of the black subject in white society. Thus, free jazz and black electronic music imagine a future that is inevitably condemned to the past.
Sounds in Diaspora. The Cinema of the Black Audio Film Collective
Held on 02, 03, 09, 10, 16 Jul 2014
Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film. Sounds in Diaspora comprises five sessions that run through this collective’s work, presented in Spain for the first time. Founded by John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Lina Gopaul, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson, Edward George and Claire Joseph, the collective was a multidisciplinary team made up of film-makers, sound artists, activists, sociologists and producers, characterised by the horizontal work it distributed, along with an overhaul of realist documentary making through the display of colonial imagery originating from archive. Their films question the identity hegemony during the years of Thatcherism and, under the influence of Stuart Hall and nascent film theory, they came to examine popular culture – cinema in particular – as the primary element of resistance.
The Black Audio Film Collective stands out because of its formulation of an aesthetic programme centred on updating the revolutionary approaches of Third Cinema, which emerged in Latin America, Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 70s. As a result, they would conceive a language that was able to represent the subject and the experience of diaspora; while Third Cinema articulated global imagery of resistance based on the tension between the coloniser and the colonised, Black Audio would transform these notions from metropolitan Europe. Their work advances a more complex, nomadic and cosmopolitan identity, where travel, dispossession and fragmented memory form a visual and sound palimpsest that joins the past to the present as the country to the colony, the exploiter and the colonised become inseparable.
Curatorship
Chema González
Más actividades
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.