On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
Cinema Commons #1
Red Horse, Red Horse’s depiction of the destruction of Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1881
Graphite, coloured in pencil and ink
Held on 23, 24, 25, 30, 31 oct 2025
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
Inside the framework of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 23 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 1. Lecture by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
—Encounter with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros to discuss the CSOA La Morada film society and the Lavapiés Film Festival.
viernes 24 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 2. John Ford. Fort Apache
USA, 1948, black and white, 35mm, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 127’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
Men who are not afraid of dying are often afraid of living. The soldiers in Fort Apache ward off this fear with dancing, jokes and drink. Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, assigned to be in command of these soldiers, averts this fear by living for posterity; that is, for death. He gives orders, and they obey, for “the uniform is not a subject for individual expression”. The newspaper headlines he dreams of come to declare war on another people. The Apaches perhaps could have shown the border outpost community what a stateless people can look like, yet the possibility of founding something new is reached by the past, by European civilisation, by Boston civilisation. Thursday lets his wrath rain down with overwhelming force and Ford, a realist film-maker and here with his version of the Battle of Little Bighorn, conveys at once the facts and the legend.
sábado 25 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 3. John Gianvito. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
USA, 2001, colour, DA, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 168’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
A woman who takes the surname Hussein by marriage, a teenager, and a former soldier are the three characters whom the Gulf War removes from their homes and turns them into nomadic figures. Set on the frontier, like Fort Apache, the film begins with the bodies of two children floating on Río Grande. As with Ford’s supporting roles, we soon encounter them fleetingly but with intensity, enough for their deaths to matter. By the 1990s, the enemy had shifted from Indians to Arabs. The here of fiction mixes with the there of documentary; fiction in the USA wraps and preserves the records of Iraq: a musical composition on the bombing of the al-Amiriyah shelter, photos of the “highway of death” that nobody wanted to publish. The roaming figures wander and beauty and terror occur, yet no feeling is definitive.
jueves 30 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 2 (second screening). John Ford. Fort Apache
USA, 1948, black and white, 35mm, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 127’
viernes 31 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 3 (second screening). John Gianvito. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
USA, 2001, colour, DA, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 168’
Participants
Miriam Martín has devoted her whole adult life to film, and part of her pre-adult life. First as a viewer, then as a film curator at different institutions. For just shy of six years, she organised the Chantal film society, an aesthetic and political experience organised weekly. In 2019, she made the film La espada me la ha Regalado, and in 2023 premiered Vuelta a Riaño.
Ana Useros is a translator and activist who has been part of the organising assembly of the Lavapiés Film Festival for seventeen years.
Actividad dentro de la programación...
Cinema Commons
Cinema Commons is a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film and sound experiences articulate interpretive communities, fostering collective debate and devising proposals for common spaces. Constructed in two annual editions, this year it will explore three core strands: the alternative film society as a place of utopia and resistance, with film curators Miriam Martín and Ana Useros; the work of artist Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir, a learning collective focused on African diaspora and inspired by the trailblazing Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène; and the union between activism and celluloid, machine and poetry, in the L’Abominable Laboratory, located on the outskirts of Paris.
The project addresses processes of socialisation and film’s potential beyond the image, with this edition bringing together different practices which explore film’s capacity to assemble and produce common spaces, understood in architectural, social and political terms. Film has always been a decisive tool in struggles for emancipation and, setting out from this genealogy, the proposals in this edition look to understand the role it can play in today’s cultural and political context, overcoming the dominant forms of representation and its modes of distribution to advance towards an ethics of life in common.
Ver programa
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
This second instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common space, comprises three sessions with Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker Christian Nyampeta and Ècole du soir. The programme’s first session screens video works made by Nyampeta, while the second sets forth a dialogue on the creative processes of Ècole du soir. The third brings proceedings to a close with the screening of a film selected by the artist: Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992).
The work of Christian Nyampeta 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.
The New York-based artist from Rwanda uses art and museums to create spaces of encounter and common learning that predate colonial education models. Via popular culture frames of reference like comics, music and film, Nyampeta develops dynamics and spaces from which to build experiences which redress the wounds of diaspora and its consequences; further, his work recovers, makes visible and heals — through a pedagogical and artistic process — the social divides of the African people. With Ècole du soir he also works on creations without authorship and uses the counter-ethnographic legacy of novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembène as a tool to deconstruct the Western view of Africa.
![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
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.