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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
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. 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 edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.