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November 12 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Theatricalizing the Colonial Past
7:00 p.m. Introduction to the Film Series by the curator, TJ Demos. 7:30 p.m. Projections:
Vincent Meessen. Vita Nova, 2009
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 26’Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. Ça va, ça va, on continue, 2012
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 26’Pedro Costa. Sweet Exorcist, 2012
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 20’In recalling colonial life and the revolutionary moment of liberation, the diverse films of Vincent Meessen, Mathieu Abonnenc, and Pedro Costa, offer poignant entrances into current collective memory, overdetermined by the will-to-forget as much as by the painful reminders of what could have been but never was. How are current-day figures haunted by that past and its erstwhile dreams of emancipation? What can present archaeologies into the ghostly realm turn up, for instance, in regards to past critical studies of colonialism (as by Roland Barthes, as examined in Vita Nova)? And how are such visitations comparable to the troubled remembrance of former freedom fighters who struggled in now-forgotten movements of decolonization and socialist liberation, as in Portugal’s Carnation revolution of 1974, which ended the fascist regime of Estado Novo, a history alluded to in the work of Costa and Abonnenc?.
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November 13 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Songs against Caste in India
Anand Patwardhan. Jai Bhim Comrade, 2011
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 199’Premiering in Spain with this screening, Jai Bhim Comrade traces the atrocity of caste in India through the songs, poetry, and resistance culture from below. Shot over fourteen years, this masterpiece made by the foremost Indian documentarian investigates the fraught circumstances of the country’s Dalits, denigrated as “untouchables” for thousands of years, denied education, access to religious institutions, and allotted the lowest forms of manual labor. The film investigates the revolutionary figure of Bhimrao Ambedkar, who led the struggle for emancipation of his people, earned doctorates abroad, and came to write the country’s Constitution, eventually rejecting Hinduism’s repressive castism in favor of Buddhism. Patwardhan shows how Ambedkar’s demands for liberation and equality —comprising steps more radical than Gandhi had envisaged— live on in legend, storytelling, and collective song, in the subaltern aesthetics and just reason of India’s contemporary underclass, as revealed in the tragic story of Vilas Ghogre, a leftist poet and beloved street singer who hung himself in protest over the suppressed unrealized promise of Ambedkar’s vision.
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November 19 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Aesthetics after Genocide
Rithy Panh. The Missing Picture, 2013
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 90’Motivated by Panh’s desire to find photographic documentation of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal rule in Cambodia between 1975 to 1979, The Missing Picture confronts not only the absence of actually existing visual evidence that can prove mass murder, but the irrevocable fact of representation’s inadequacy in recording the definitive History and Truth of events. What results is a moving tale about the Cambodian Security Prison S-21, told using clay figures, archival footage, and Panh’s voiceover that narrates the filmmaker’s searching quest for an image of atrocity that can only ever go missing.
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November 20 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Past Potential Futures
Sven Augustijnen. Spectres, 2011
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 104’The Otolith Group. In the Year of the Quiet Sun, 2013
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 33’The era of postwar decolonization in Africa was one filled with the imagined futures of liberation and independence, futures gradually clouded over by neocolonial regimes of financial servitude to world markets enabled by dictatorial regimes. In some cases, the leaders of newly independent nations who promised self-determination, were brutally arrested, tortured, and summarily executed (as in the case of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of postcolonial Congo), the history of which is shown to be obsessively reconstructed by a former Belgian diplomat and colonial apologist in Augustijnen’s film. Against such historiographic domination, The Otolith Group (composed of British artists and theorists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) rescues the diplomacy of 1960s Pan-Africanism, focusing on the emerging material culture of independence, specifically as constituted by the form of the postage stamp whose imagery proclaimed a new dawn of sovereignty. Yet it was also one that, in its iconography of monumentalized leaders, also divulges signs of the eventual eclipse of those imagined futures of emancipation also announced in this postal imaginary.
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November 26 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Spectral Ecologies
Ursula Biemann. Deep Weather, 2013
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 9’Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares. Forest Law/Selva jurídica, 2014
Video installation, 41’. Screening format: one-channel version digital file. 30'Zanny Begg y Oliver Ressler. The Right of Passage, 2013
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 19’Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather examines ecologies of devastation, including industrial destruction of the earth, looking closely at the hydrocarbon extraction taking place in Canada’s Alberta tar sands. This fossil fuel geo-engineering project produces ever more greenhouse gases, leading to rising seas, and Biemann also investigates the contemporary effects as felt in Bangladesh’s delta. The short video brings visual appearance to areas that put the lie to global neoliberalism’s growth model of “sustainable development.” In a second film, Biemann and Paulo Tavares investigate recent legal developments in Ecuador regarding “the rights of nature,” bringing legal standing to non-human subjects in order to protect against environmental destruction. These films share with Begg and Ressler’s The Right of Passage a re-arrangement of what counts in the realm of the visible, in their case, bringing attention to the ghostly presences of migrant subjects who, in an act of counter-spectralization that rejects a depoliticizing invisibility, contest the normalization of national identity and xenophobic policies in the EU.
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November 27 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Commemorating Postcolonial Subjects
John Akomfrah. The Stuart Hall Project, 2013
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 100’The Stuart Hall Project, 2013, is a masterful recent film by veteran member of Black Audio Film Collective John Akomfrah. It explores the professional life of Stuart Hall, the renowned Cultural Studies theorist and British-Jamaican public intellectual. Constructed from documentary footage sourced from the BBC’s archive, the film builds on the now-disbanded Black Audio Collective’s filmic studies (the focus of a recent film series held in the Museo) of great twentieth century intellectuals, activists, and cultural figures, such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Michael X, and influential musicians like Sun Ra and George Clinton. In his new work, Akomfrah sets himself the challenge of giving aesthetic expression to Hall’s fundamental insight that “identities are formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history,” including political narratives, postcolonial experience in postwar Britain, and contentious media archives. The piece materializes the subject within a heterogeneous image-archive resonating with the lived experience of migratory displacement—Hall moved to Britain in 1951 and lived there till his death in 2014—and the deterritorialized drift of recall between history and memory.
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December 3 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Militant Environments
Brad Butler y Karen Mirza. The Unreliable Narrator, 2014
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 16’Sanjay Kak. Red Ant Dream, 2013
Digital, Original version, subtitled, 120’This session looks to a younger generation of contemporary moving image practitioners that address military conflict in India.
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s Unreliable Narrator examines the traumatic events of 2008 when Mumbai was hit with a series of coordinated bombing and shooting attacks carried out by Pakistani members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militant group based in Pakistan dedicated to establishing a Muslim state in South Asia. Examining violence and mediatization, sacrifice and the contested power of narrative, the film mixes documentary and CCTV footage with shots from a 2013 Bollywood Hindu docudrama of the events. We learn how terrorism increasingly haunts in the guise of spectacle, and how it is exorcized through the entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Sanjay Kak’s Red Ant Dream looks at the militant guerilla revolution taking place in India’s rural forests of Chhatisgarh, the site of a Maoist struggle against both the state’s economics of inequality and its pro-industry disregard for tribal ecosystems and natural rights. The specter of a future eco-catastrophe, propelled by India’s Western-style development, in this case drives the militant defense of the survival of India’s impoverished tribals and agrarian villagers.
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December 4 and 10 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Hauntologies, Near and Far
December 4
Salomé Lamas. No Man’s Land, 2012
Digital HD, Original version, subtitled, 72’December 10
Los Hijos. Trees, 2013
Digital HD, 61’
Introduction by the authors
In Salomé Lamas’s No Man’s Land, we encounter a Portuguese mercenary and hit-man who tells of his experiences fighting in the final days of colonial Africa, and as an agent of GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación), participating in the state-sponsored death squads directed against the Basque separatists of ETA and the latter’s safe havens in France. We learn of his relations to the cruelties and paradoxes of power, only to face his tortuous ethical justifications for his horrible crimes, leaving us to wonder: Is he haunted by the violence he’s committed? With Trees, the focus is on the survivors of colonial terror. The film depicts the visit of Antonia Pilar to Bioko, the island off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, where she hears stories of the Spanish colonial past. Created by Colectivo Los Hijos (comprising Spanish artists Javier Fernández Vázquez, Luis López Carrasco, and Natalia Marin Sancho), the film relates legends of the native Bubi people, and juxtaposes it to the contemporary experiences of a young white Spanish couple living in a residential colonies in the periphery of Madrid during financial crisis and confronting persistent unemployment. Trees shows how colonial violence and creative resistance live on in poetic fragments marooned in the present.
Specters. A Cinema of Haunting
Held on 12, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27 Nov, 03, 04, 10 Dec 2014
Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come. Still others speak to the unfulfilled promises of the past that continue to live on, dormant in our present. The inclusions, diverse and necessarily incomplete, represent powerful examples that join poignant aesthetic formulation to inspiring political commitment, and have been drawn from a range of geographical contexts that reference history, culture, and politics in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
The series borrows its title from the recent film Spectres of Sven Augustijnen (2011), examining the disquieting presences from times outside of the contemporary, it offers less an iconography of otherworldly beings than a conjuring of haunting disturbances existing at the edges of representation. At the same time, the program alludes to the history of militant cinema, what the Argentine Octavio Getino, a film-maker and theorist of Third Cinema, would call ciné-politics, a popular and radical image that embodied the critical legacy of Avant-garde movements.
To be sure, most of the films in this series bear little resemblance to the collective revolt of militant cinema; yet they do advance the erstwhile commitment to documenting violence, struggling against repression, refusing to forget, and striving for a better world. As such, this series offers a ciné-politics of decolonization that offers a critical antidote to pervasive amnesia, and a space where the post-militant image can be revisited. This coming-into-being, however, is no exorcism or redemptive return-to-forgetting, but, to reanimate Derrida’s words, presents an ethico-political imperative: to “learn to live with ghosts, more justly.”
Curatorship
TJ Demos
Más actividades
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.