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Screening one: Thursday, 4 July – 7pm / Screening two: Thursday, 11 July – 7pm
Session 1
Images of Transgression
Kirsten Bates and Allen Frame. Turmoil in the Garden
USA, 1983, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 38’
Script: an adaptation of Sounds in the Distance, by David Wojnarowicz
Cast: Allen Frame, Tara Kelly, Nan Goldin, Kirsten Bates, Elisabeth Walker, Bill Rice, Brian Burchill, Suzanne Fletcher, Frank Franca.Richard Kern. Manhattan Love Suicides: Stray Dogs
USA, 1985, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, Super8 transferred to digital, 12’
Cast: Montanna Houston, Robin Renzi, Bill Rice and David Wojnarowicz
Music: J.G. ThirlwellRichard Kern. You Killed Me First
USA, 1985, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, Super8 transferred to digital, 12’
Cast: David Wojnarowicz, Nick Cooper, Jessica Craig-Martin, Karen Finley, Montana Houston, Lung Leg
Music: J.G. ThirlwellDavid Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner. Where Evil Dwells
USA, 1985, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 31’
Cast: Joe Coleman, Devil Doodie, Richard Klemann, Lung Leg, Jack Nantz, Rockets Redglare, Tommy Turner, Charlotte Webb, Scott Werner, David Wojnarowicz
Music: AC/DC, J.G. Thirlwell and Wiseblood.Tom Rubnitz. Listen to This
USA, 1992, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 16’
Cast: David WojnarowiczThis first session is presented by artist, researcher and writer Alan W. Moore. A key component of New York’s punk scene and an activist in the 1970s and 1980s, he is a member of groups and platforms such as ABC No Rio, Colab and MWF Video Club, and the author of books that include Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City (2011) and Occupation Culture: Art and Squatting in the City from Below (2015).
Turmoil in the Garden is a theatrical production with monologues adapted from David Wojnarowicz’s first book, Sounds in the Distance (1982). The texts are an example of artistic ethnography and describe a life of survival on the streets of New York, listening to and recording marginal figures Wojnarowicz dealt with in his experiences as a male prostitute. The work, with echoes of Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams, is performed by friends of the artist, for instance Nan Goldin, Frank Franca, Allen Frame and Elizabeth Walker. In Manhattan Love Suicides, Wojnarowicz plays a stalker compulsively in love with a man he meets randomly on the street, and who turns out to be an artist, played by Bill Rice. You Killed Me First is the story of a dysfunctional, repressive family and its children, one of which is played by Sonic Youth and Cinema of Transgression muse, Lung Leg, who has reached breaking point. Wojnarowiz plays an abusive and authoritarian father, drawing on his own autobiographical experience. Where Evil Dwells explores a traumatic crime from that period: the murder of a teenager by his teenage friend, Ricky Kasso, who was under the influence of drugs and the alleged satanic occultism alluded to in heavy metal, music which marks the pulse and rhythm of the film. For Wojnarowicz, Ricky Kasso was the leader of a dark and repressed America, “a kind of Ronald Reagan”, as he would write in his memoir. Finally, in Listen to This Wojnorawicz plays an executive who, from his office, delivers a tirade against the situation of the homosexual artist in American society, interspersing images of contemporary culture – a short film demonstrating the power of Wojnarowicz as a symbol and social model, his fiery response against venomous backlash and the US Government’s failure to act during the AIDS crisis.
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Screening one: Sunday, 7 July – 5pm / Screening two: Sunday, 14 July – 5pm
Session 2
Melancholia and Moralism
David Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler. Fear of Disclosure
USA, 1989, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 5’David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill. ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion)
USA, 1991, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 49’. Originally presented at The Kitchen, New York, in 1989.In his essay Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp acknowledges the importance of mourning and lamentation over loss, producing an artistic and theoretical manifestation which responds to the devastating effects of AIDS. To that end, the session sets out from this elegiac and poetic response, in which two experimental, queer works speak of the future of medicated lives, the fear of infection and the disappearance of the body with a semi-wakeful tone encapsulating the disease that ravaged a whole generation and would ultimately end David Wojnarowicz’s life aged just 37. Fear of Disclosure was first screened at the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival in 1989; in this short video, partying and club culture becomes an epigram on sexual encounters after infection. In the words of the film-makers, it constitutes “an exploration of the act of disclosing to a potential lover that you’re HIV positive, the virus believed to cause AIDS. Two go-go dancers at New York’s Pyramid Club jump and rub against each other while they recognise their own mortality”. ITSOFOMO, the second work, is a disturbing and visceral multimedia piece, conceived as a live performance and adapted here in a screening which combines Wojnarowicz’s writing, the sound improvisation of composer Ben Neill and the images the former repeatedly used as symbols and allegories. ITSOFOMO refers to the consequences of “acceleration”, a term the artists discovered reading the work of French theorist Paul Virilio and his criticism, in natural time, of contemporary capitalism. Both would apply the term to the immediacy with which AIDS was wiping out bodies and erasing a story of resistance and the fight for equality.
Held on 04, 05, 09, 12 jul 2019
Inside the framework of the exhibition David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night (running until 30 September 2019), this series presents the post-punk and trash experiences that resulted from the film collaborations of artist David Wojnarowicz (New Jersey, USA, 1954 – New York, USA, 1992) with New York’s East Village art community in the 1980s. The programme, comprising two double sessions, features the work of Richard Kern, Tommy Turner, Kirsten Bates, Allen Frame, Ben Neill and Phil Zwickler, artists for whom life on the edge was a way to express their keen sense of rage and discontent with the sexual moralism and complaisance that pervaded the USA across that decade.
The title of the series, ‘deathtripping’, is in reference to a term writer Jack Sargeant used to characterise the underground film experiences in New York in the 1980s, in the book Deathtripping. The Cinema of Transgression (1995). Moreover, this expression condenses the ambivalence gathered in the series, for instance the sexual vitalism of the gay community in opposition to the thanatological paranoia AIDS produced, or moral freedom on the margins of consent in opposition to the rage against a society which only tolerated such freedom while it remained precarious and out of sight.
Across two highly divergent sessions, the series surveys these dilemmas between violence and autonomy, destruction and love. In the first, searing and parodic works are displayed, acerbically distilling a profound non-conformity with the American way of life and united in fiction through the most violent protests against the system, from serial killers to massacres meted out randomly among the population — as Wojnarowicz wrote, behind the sheen of the American dream is the “killing machine called America”. The second session, meanwhile, leaves these iconoclastic and transgressive gestures to one side, reflecting instead on loss and mourning with Fear of Disclosure and ITSOFOMO, two works lying between performance, multimedia installation and expanded cinema. In both, David Wojnarowicz’s writing, live music and fragmentary and elusive images compose a mood which masterfully encapsulates a time of anger and melancholia.
Curatorship
Alan Moore and Chema González
Acknowledgements
Collaborative Projects, Inc.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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.