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September 27, 2013
Session 1
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Carlos Muguiro. The other cinema and the cinema of the other
In 2001 Alejandro Amenábar's film The Others became the biggest box-office smash in the history of Spanish film and seemed to point to the new “uninhibited and international” road that would be taken by the first generation of filmmakers of the 21st century. Ten years later, the phrase ‘the others’ refers, paradoxically, to a cinematographic regeneration that has conspicuously little in common with the earlier proposal. It could be said that, at this point in time, ghosts are what really inhabit the house of Spanish film. Referring to the new paths of Spanish cinema as "the other cinema" revives one of the avant-garde's traditional concepts: that of otherness, understanding this term - following Octavio Paz - as strangeness, stupefaction, paralysis of the mind: astonishment. The question asked by this encounter is whether ‘the other Spanish cinema’ is really a cinema of ‘otherness.’
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Jean Pierre Rehm. The new forms of documentary
8:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Carlos Muguiro and Jean Pierre Rehm
Round table
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September 28, 2013
Session 2
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Miquel Martí Freixas. Spaces for criticism, dissemination and visibility. Some questions for the futureIn Spain, for over a decade now considerable audiovisual activity has been taking place outside of industrial production, partly as the legacy of past eras. This “new” realm of audiovisuals is emerging thanks to the digital media and it is becoming known thanks to the internet, where pioneering spaces for criticism and dissemination are appearing. For the first time, coinciding with the crisis in cultural models, attention is being paid to it, which is helping put this broad, and sometimes contradictory, audiovisual space at a junction that has yet to be defined.
7:00 - 8:15 p.m.
Training, visibility and circuits
Round table with Andrés Duque and Elías León Siminiani. Moderated by: Laura Gómez Vaquero
Master programs in documentary creation, independent film production companies, specialised film festivals, cinemas, cultural spaces, museums, art centres, digital dissemination and exhibition platforms, and even a few social networks… The production, promotion, distribution and legitimation of a certain documentary cinema with an experimental bent involves the use of a wide variety of places and strategies. This encounter with Andrés Duque and Elías León Siminiani, who at this time are two of the most emblematic filmmakers of this “other cinema”, reveals some of the most important keys to understanding the new (and old) realms in which it moves.
8:15 - 9:00 p.m.
Questions and answers: Andrés Duque, Elías León Siminiani, Miquel Martí Freixas and Laura Gómez Vaquero

Held on 27, 28 sep 2013
Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema. Although they lack a unifying element and have uneven institutional recognition, these films have made quite a solid appearance on the scene, receiving recognition at both art centres and at international festivals, right when the audiovisual industry finds itself faced with the dilemma of whether to choose profitability, as the only means of survival.
This seminar, produced by ICAA and Museo Reina Sofía, brings together, for two days of study, some of the most relevant actors in the field. At the same time, the seminar is linked to the recently-programmed series Urgencies of contemporaneity (2012) and Unending stories (2013), both of which explored this new cinematography.
Organised by
ICAA and Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Carlos Muguiro. Artistic director of the Festival Punto de Vista de Navarra from 2006 to 2009, Muguiro also helped found this event in 2005. Author of, among other publications, Jardines de la visión, Aguaespejo granadino y el avant-garden cinematográfico (in : desbordamiento de Val del Omar, 2011), Ver sin Vertov : una introducción a cincuenta años de cine de no-ficción ruso y soviético (1954-2004) (2005), El hombre sin la cámara: el cine de Alan Berliner (2002) and El cine de los mil años: una aproximación histórica y estética al cine documental japonés (1945-2005) (2005).
Jean Pierre Rehm. Director since 2002 of the International Documentary Film Festival of Marseilles, one of the most important venues for international recognition of the new forms of documentary. Also, author and participant in exhibition projects such as Hotel Europa (2003), Peter Friedl (2006) and Political Typographies: Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe (2007).
Miquel Martí Freixas. Editor and founder of Blogs&Docs, an independent platform for debate and criticism about the other cinema. Critic and programmer, he teaches documentary film at the Film and Audivisual School of Catalunya (ESCAC).
Andrés Duque. The work of Andrés Duque shows a subjective narrative without a defined voice, built from the distance provided by continual experimentation with precarious images, found footage and the direct cinema style with which his films are constructed. His Final Essay for Utopia inaugurated the recent series Urgencies of Contemporaneity.
Elías León Siminiani. The author of cinema characterised by first person narratives as a mechanism for interrogating the world, Siminiani has built a fictional document that is carefully measured and has unexpected appeal to general audiences. In addition, his works, both the successive series Conceptos clave del mundo moderno and features such as Mapa, have received considerable international recognition.
Laura Gómez Vaquero. A professor of film at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Gomez has worked with recent Spanish film on a practical level (as the programmer of series and member of the advisory committee of Documenta Madrid in its last four editions) and also on the theoretical level, through her research activity. With respect to the latter, of particular importance are her publications Piedra, papel y tijera. El collage en el cine documental (co-ordinated with Sonia García López, Documenta Madrid, 2009) and Las voces del cambio. La palabra en el documental durante la transición en España (Documenta Madrid, 2012).
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.
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.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
September, 2025 – May, 2026
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.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.