Held on 16 dic 2021
Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.
A sharp observation by Jean-Luc Godard on Israeli and Palestinian film is also applicable to our European vision of socially committed Arab cinema: the resource of fable and fiction is the “property” of Israeli film-makers, whereas there is insistence upon Palestinians for the factual immediacy of the documentary image; put another way, reality in its most precarious and miserable state. Mapping Lessons monumentally breaks this division and is striking as a sophisticated and intelligent film about social utopia in the contemporary Arab world, whereby a montage of historical archives is mixed with an experimental exercise in narrative fiction. Thus, it forms a constellation of radical movements, from the Soviets of the Russian Revolution to present-day communes in Syria, assembled through travel diaries and memories of Arab subjects who have lived through these times of change and expectation.
In the words of Philip Rizk: “After the crushing of our revolution in Egypt in 2013, Mapping Lessons began as a daydream. The film is a visual conversation between political struggles across time and space, from anti-colonial battles against the French and British in the 1920s, to the Syrian Revolution in 2011, 1936 Spain, a revisionist memory of Russian Soviets and the Paris Commune, among others. Mapping Lessons was my way of relating our neo-colonial relationship with the past, all with an eye on what to do the next time”.
Philip Rizk (Limassol, Cyprus, 1982) is a film-maker and activist. He is a member of Mosireen, a collective that broadcast and composed a real-time archive of the 2011 Egyptian revolution (858: An Archive of Resistance). After studying philosophy and anthropology, he has worked in the field of video since 2008. His productions have been screened at international festivals such as Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. In 2015, he participated in the German pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia with Out on the Street, a film made with Jasmina Metwaly the same year. His essay on images and the Egyptian Revolution “2011 is not 1968: An Open Letter to an Onlooker” was published in the anthology Uncommon Grounds. New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (compiled by Antony Downey, I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Javier H. Estrada is a critic, lecturer and cinema programmer. He holds an MA in the History of Film and Visual Media from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is head of programming at the Seville Film Festival and the FILMADRID International Film Festival. He is also a member of the editorial board for the magazines Caimán. Cuadernos de cine and Secuencias. Revista de historia del cine.
Programme
Thursday, 16 December – 6pm
Philip Rizk. Mapping Lessons
—Presentation and talk by Philip Rizk
Saturday, 18 November – 6pm
Philip Rizk. Mapping Lessons
—Presentation and talk by Philip Rizk and Javier H. Estrada
Credits
Mapping Lessons
Egypt, 2020, colour and b/w, original version in Arabic, French, German, English and Ukrainian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 61’
Director, editor and producer:Philip Rizk Editing advisor:Mohamed Hassan ShawkyDesign, supervision and sound editing:Max SchneiderSound editing:Nadah El ShazlyTranslations:Farah Barqawi, Katharine Halls y Ma Hoogla-Kalfat (MaYo)With interventions by:Farah Barqawi, Walid, Aylin Çankaya, Saeed al-Wakeel, Matthieu Rey, Ahmed, Z, M. and Osama al-HosseinWith the support of:Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FFAI) and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin ProgramProduced in:AFAC Unspoken Series at Volksbühne Roter Salon
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Participants
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.