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Friday, 11 December 2020 – 7pm/ Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 1. First session. Filming Performance
Narcisa Hirsch
Marabunta (Swarm)
Filming and editing by Raymundo Gleyzer. Lead roles: Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann and Walther Mejía
Argentina, 1967, b/w, sound, 16 mm transferred to digital, 7’55’’Muñecos (Dolls)/Have a Baby
Argentina, USA and UK, 1972, colour, silent, Super-8 transferred to digital, 15’31’’Manzanas (Apples)
Argentina, 1973, colour, original version in Spanish, 16 mm transferred to digital, 4’La noche bengalí (The Bengali Night), co-directed with Werner Nekes
Argentina, 1980, colour, silent, 16 mm transferred to digital, 6’30’’Testamento y vida interior (Testament and Inner Life)
Argentina, 1976, colour, sound, video transferred to digital, 10’38’’Retrato de una artista como ser humano (Portrait of a Woman Artist as a Human Being)
Argentina, 1973, colour, sound, video transferred to digital, 15’51’’Narcisa Hirsch’s first incursions into film were to record her performances and happenings in public spaces. Collective actions, first shot in Super-8 and 16 mm, and later in video, in which Hirsch and the group of artists she worked with sought a different, more direct relationship with a spectator found randomly. These early works also reveal themes the artist would develop across her film work: the mystery of birth and death and our relationship to nature.
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Saturday, 12 December 2020 – 5pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Landscape and Experience
Narcisa Hirsch
Rumi
Argentina, 1995–1999, colour, sound, 16 mm transferred to digital, 27’A-Dios
Argentina, 1989, colour, sound, Super-8 transferred to digital, 22’Patagonia 2
Argentina, 1976, colour, sound, Super-8 transferred to digital, 9’56’’Patagonia takes centre stage and is at the heart of Narcisa Hirsch’s film work as a space of natural encounter, of union between body and the eternal, of dialogue between elements that are at once intimate and immense. This second session in the series includes some of the films in which the film-maker explores Patagonian landscapes and develops her relationship with them.
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Sunday, 13 December 2020 – 12:30pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. Experiments with Experimentation
Narcisa Hirsch
Taller (Workshop)
Argentina, 1971, colour, original version in Spanish, 16 mm transferred to digital, 10’Come out
Argentina, 1971, colour, sound, 16 mm transferred to digital, 11’Ama-zona
Argentina, 1983, colour, sound, Super-8 transferred to digital, 10’38’’Canciones napolitanas (Neapolitan Songs)
Argentina, 1971, colour, sound, 16 mm transferred to digital, 10’Aleph
Argentina, 2005, colour, original version in Spanish, Betacam SP transferred to digital, 1’Myst
Argentina, 2019, colour, original version in Spanish and English, video transferred to digital, 15’This third session more clearly expounds the relation Narcisa Hirsch’s work bears to many of the ideas and currents in experimental film: from structural cinema to more sensorial and poetic film-making via abstraction. In these works, we witness Hirsch explore different paths in the experimental genre, making them hers and bringing them closer to her idiosyncratic themes: the feminine body, Argentinian tradition, landscape and nature.
Held on 11 dic 2020
Narcisa Hirsch is one of the foremost figures in the history of Latin American and international experimental film. Born in Germany in 1928, and living in Argentina since her childhood, her name has lurked in the shadows unduly, owing to a twofold “eccentricity”: being a woman and making films that lie outside central spaces constructing the history of this filmic modality: the United States and Europe.
Yet this binary, off-centre state has not stopped her from being mindful of world movements in experimental film and video art. Her own work, at once domestic and mystical, is related to canonical films and figures from video and experimental art as it constantly shuns imitation and vindicates film as a space of freedom. In Hirsch’s own words: “The freedom of working to a really tight budget is the freedom of not having to sell; the freedom of working in a way that is DIY and artisan, without big teams or stages. I don’t rush either. One frame per day, or one per year. Everyone chooses their time and space, and it’s because of that and everything else that experimental film is a subversive art, more than documentary or political film. More subversive than intellectual or conceptual film. That’s why few go and fewer still remain”.
Hirsch’s first foray into art was as a painter and draughtswoman in the 1960s, before suddenly leaping into public space, staging happenings in the search for a new kind of spectator. Understanding film and creation as a collective process of work and thought, she has built, since the start of her career, a sturdy community around her filmic and artistic practice, a wide-ranging network of experimental artists and film-makers who came together through the Union of Small-Gauge Film-makers (UNCIPAR), around the Goethe Institute and Di Tella Institute, originally comprising figures such as Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Jorge Honik, Juan José Mugni, Horacio Vallereggio and Juan Villola, who are all, ultimately, key to the formation of Argentina’s independent and experimental scene. A network and solid conception of collectiveness that remains today, and, even at the age of ninety-two, Hirsch holds weekly encounters (in-person before the pandemic, now online) with an extensive network of young film-makers and aficionados of experimental cinema that embrace her work.
This retrospective is made up of three sessions reflecting some of the must-see pictures in her film oeuvre, made from the 1960s onwards. These works, chosen to engage in dialogue with the film-maker, illuminate spiritual and existential themes: love, birth, death, eroticism and feminine power, orbiting around the materiality of the body. In Narcisa Hirsch’s work domestic scenes and landscapes of inner-city and outlying areas of Buenos Aires and Patagonia function as an amplification of an exploration that is both formal and personal: the body, the eternal, the inside, the outside, movement, that which remains, intimacy and collectivity.
This programme is framed inside a joint project between Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council and returning this year, in 2020, in a hybrid format combining in-person and online formats.
Curators
Cecilia Barrionuevo, in collaboration with Narcisa Hirsch
Acknowledgements
Daniela Muttis and Tomás Rautenstrauch (the Narcisa Hirsch Cinematheque)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (17th International Film Festival)
Admission: Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the last working day before the activity. A maximum of 1 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before screenings
![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.