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Monday, 23 May 2022 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 1. Opening Lecture
TicketsThe Inequation of Prime Numbers
—Conducted by Gonzalo García-PelayoMathematics as a measurement of chance is behind major avant-garde art operations in the twentieth-century, such as Dadaism, Calculated Abstraction or Process Art. García-Pelayo would embark upon a similar path to Marcel Duchamp when he decided to turn a material accident, the factory specs of roulette tables, into a predictive method that would see him win in casinos around the world. It would also result in him being banned from different casinos, a battle the film-maker would later win in court, and lead to the manufacturing of new “anti-Pelayo” tables. In this master lecture, the film-maker picks apart the mathematical formula that has most interested him, that which expresses the primality of numbers; that is, a paradigm that is not based on what it is, equality or even numbers, but rather what it isn’t, the inequality of odd numbers. “For me, this formula has an aesthetic connection with my considerations inside counterculture, given that it would be an inequation of official culture”, the film-maker asserts.
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Wednesday, 25 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 10 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Seville, Counterculture Capital, Despite the Sorrows
TicketsGonzalo García-Pelayo. Smash and Gong in Dom Gonzalo
Spain, 1968, colour, original version in Spanish, Super-8 transferred to digital, 4’30’’Juana Dolores. Miss Universe
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 14’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Living in Seville
Spain, 1978, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 108'—Featuring a conversation between Gonzalo García-Pelayo and Paulino Viota in the second part
There is a counterculture that is unmistakeably southern — chaotic, carnivalesque, marginal, working class — with Seville its epicentre and its beginnings the Dom Gonzalo night club, founded by Gonzalo García-Pelayo in 1968. The session begins with the only existing Super-8 footage of this setting, shot by García-Pelayo, and with a Smash and Gong concert, two legendary bands that fused psychodelia and flamenco, a musical combination which the film-maker, also a music producer, worked on decisively. Living in Seville is a film-paean which outlines the instability of transition-to-democracy Spain (abuses of police power, squats, workers’ strikes) with an irrepressible urge to live and love. With echoes of Jean-Luc Godard in terms of youth and passion — Miguel is torn between Ana and Teresa — and also Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet in the use of language and directing actors, Living in Seville culminates in a reading of the Spanish Constitution, casting light on new cinema for a new era. The first of these sessions concludes with a talk by Juana Dolores on eroticism, inspired by Godard’s Masculin Féminin, and the sexual theories of Georges Bataille.
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Friday, 27 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Saturday, 11 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. Mad Love
TicketsJosé Luis Tirado. Mother, Saint, Whore
Spain, 2019, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 24’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Manuela
Spain, 1975, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 98'—A concert performed by Laura Merchal in homage to Manuela in the second part
The session opens with a medium-length film by fellow Seville native José Luis Tirado, a work which explores the three roles monotheistic religions attribute to women — the giver of life, the carer and the whore provocateur of male desire — still substantially rooted and visible in contemporary patriarchal society. García-Pelayo’s film Manuela, meanwhile, played by Charo López — or maybe Charo López played by Manuela given the confusion between character and actress — is archetypal of these three roles. It is the director’s first film in an undertaking to make a film version of the same-titled novel by Manuel Halcón and would be the most commercial and arguably conventional of his entire filmography. Yet Pelayo manages to avoid prejudice or gender stereotypes to show the power of love as an implacable force amid the secular class struggles between tenant farmers and landowners that have dominated the Andalusian countryside throughout history. André Breton and his “mad love” and the sadistic imagery of Luis Buñuel hover over the film, although the wonderful flamenco dance at the beginning and the film’s transgressive ending with the most forbidden of taboos stare down any kind of reference point.
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Saturday, 28 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Thursday, 16 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. The Liberation of Desire
TicketsMarta Valverde. Mad Things(work in progress)
Spain, 2022, colour, original version in Spanish and audio with a live intervention by the film-maker, DA, 22’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Seafront
Spain, 1979, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 84'Philosophical reflections which start from the quotidian and bodies freed in their desires, for, as García-Pelayo’s films remind us, revolution cannot exist without the emancipation of desires. Considered by Paulino Viota, a widely recognised maestro for the film-maker, to be “the most intelligent film in Spanish cinema”, three couples arrange to meet at a seafront house to engage in partner-swapping and, in passing, commemorate the burial of conservative double standards from the dictatorship. More than forty years on, this freedom contrasts with Mad Things, the personal diary of Marina, a 26-year-old woman studying an MA in Contemporary Art while working as a prostitute: Marta Valverde’s work in progress straddles audiovisual practice and performance, in which the sordid and the banal mix with sex, and where business is the only outlook. The second session will see Marta Valverde produce a live version of the piece.
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Wednesday, 1 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 17 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 5. The Joys of Revolt
TicketsIan de la Rosa. Farrucas
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 17’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Joyous Spunking
Spain, 1982, colour, original version in Spanish with French subtitles, DA, 72’—The first session features a conversation with Gonzalo García-Pelayo, moderated by film-maker María Gisèle Royo and artist Julia de Castro, the creators of a film-homage to Joyous Spunking. The second session features a conversation with Javier García-Pelayo.
The authenticity of the margins or the notion of difference experienced by Andalusian bulerías. Farrucas is the second feature-length film by young trans director Ian de la Rosa and depicts four gypsy and Moroccan teenage girls in the impoverished neighbourhood of El Puche in Almería. The hybrid identities of gender and race and those who gaze and those whom are gazed at combine with the desires and yearnings of these young women. Joyous Spunking, meanwhile, is a lo-fi road movie on the friendship between two lower-class anti-heroes and escape as a movement which gives life meaning. In the film, with its high tempo and music crossing the underground and the vernacular —two sides of the same coin for Gonzalo García-Pelayo— a gallery of glorious and incorruptible misfits swirl.
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Thursday, 2 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 24 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 6. Between Ritual and Festivity I
TicketsIgnacio Guarderas. The Road to Rocío
Spain, 2020, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 20’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Rocío and José
Spain, 1982, colour, original version in Spanish with French subtitles, DA, 85’—A concert performed by the rociero group Madrid in homage to Rocío y José in the second part
Andalusian counterculture feeds off contradictions. Thus, there is nothing strange in the heretic and ultraorthodox church of El Palmar de Troya appearing in the underground fresco Living in Seville, in much the same way as this homage to the road to El Rocío. Synthesising the impressions of Gonzalo García-Pelayo’s twelve years of pilgrimage, Rocío and José looks at two brothers, one starting adolescence, the other well into adulthood, and how love arises for the younger one, José. On the flipside of the carnal desire of his early films, in Rocío and José landscape, the sounds of the road and sevillanas shape a mystical and ascetic poem. The session opens with Ignacio Guarderas, who carries on this anthropological gaze at El Rocío in a medium-length film on two screens which ranges over the stereotype-free natural and human landscape.
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Monday, 13 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Saturday, 25 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 7. Between Ritual and Festivity II
TicketsConcha Barquero y Alejandro Alvarado. Descartes
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 21’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Three Roads to Rocío
Spain, 1986, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 53’. Courtesy of RTVE—A presentation by Álvaro Arroba in the first part
Two films on the same theme shape the recent history of independent Spanish documentary-making: García-Pelayo’s Three Roads to Rocío and Rocío (1980), Fernando Ruiz Vergara’s censored film. In this session, Descartes is screened, a documentary made from the film reels of this film rejected by the film-maker and found by Barquero and Alvarado recently in the archive of Filmoteca Española. Both films and their epigones respond to two ways of living: Protestant and Catholic, as García-Pelayo asserts. The first renounces mundane pleasure over the fear of guilt or the manipulative ends that hide these pleasures. The second participates in the sensuality offered by these pleasures and being aware that, although they abide by dark ideological interests, glee always deserves penance. There is an issue with Ruiz Vergara’s Rocío: “he is the Protestant version, and I am the Catholic version”, García-Pelayo claims. This session denotes a clash between both belief systems.
Stop Prohibiting Because I Can’t Disobey Everything
The Films of Gonzalo García-Pelayo
Held on 23, 25, 27, 28, 30 May, 01, 02, 06, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 20, 24, 25 Jun 2022
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986. A cult film-maker, club promoter, music producer, professional gambler, editor and a speculator in the contemporary immaterial economy, García-Pelayo fits multiples lives into one. The facets mentioned condense a personal concept of film, understood as a form of existence based on vitalism, limitless desire, occurrences as a narrative strategy and insubordination to predictability, be it on a formal or political level.
The retrospective bears the title of the first of eleven contemporary films García-Pelayo made over twelve months, between 2021 and 2022, during “the year of eleven films” as he calls it. An unmatched tour de force that demonstrates how film is a way of life, first and foremost, before an industry or profession. These eleven productions are screened in the second part of this series, during September 2022. The title of the programme is also the slogan that best defines García-Pelayo’s filmic corpus and explains with greater clarity a fascination the film-maker has ignited among a young generation of film-makers, artists and producers who have retrieved his body of work, viewing it as the keystone of a heterodox genealogy of Spanish film-making since the 1970s, as well as a model with which to confront a numb society.
The historical films this series assembles are set in Spain’s changing, tumultuous society during the Transition to democracy, in the wake of the death of Francisco Franco and the country joining the European Economic Community (1975–1986). A time in which the cracks of the dictatorship’s political authoritarianism and moral conservatism reach the force of a thriving counterculture and youth’s utopian yearning to build a new society, qualities that run through García-Pelayo’s film-making. With this framework in mind, the series dispenses with a traditional historicist and revisionist orientation to situate the film-maker in a contemporary dialogue, in thematic sessions, with young artists and producers, his major themes reverberating among them: sex as a free territory, misfits and the socially marginalised as lucid and honest anti-heroes, the radical co-existence of the exalted and the popular and music — flamenco, psychodelia, sevillanas — as an eruption of the real in fiction. Among it all is a kindred spirit which transgresses forms and the limits of a self-righteous society in 1975. Or 2022 for that matter.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (19th International Film Festival)
Curators
Chema González (Museo Reina Sofía) and Luis E. Parés (Cineteca Madrid)
Inside the framework of
TIZ 3. Political Matter
Más actividades
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
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.
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026 - Registration deadline extended
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?