Documents 9. Prelinger Archives
Behind the American Dream
Rick Prelinger. Photo by David Gallagher, Freep Festival, Detroit, 2015
Held on 17 mar 2019
Created in 1982, the Prelinger Archives form the largest collection of international ephemeral cinema, with over 60,000 advertising, propaganda, educational, and amateur films, as well as home movies and American landscape films shot across the length and breadth of the 20th century — proof of its importance also lies in its acquisition in 2002 by the USA’s Library of Congress. This monumental archive becomes the focal point of the ninth edition of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Documents programme, which looks at artists’ publications, platforms, networks and independent publishing spaces, in addition to the potential of archive to reinvent narratives of art and its ecosystem. This edition opens with a presentation of the Prelinger Archives by founder Rick Prelinger, before screening different films interwoven into a common thread: the idea of future and progress in post-war American capitalism.
The content of the Prelinger Archives comprises a captivating archaeology of the cultural, social and political landscape in the United States, particularly in the period stretching from 1920 to 1980: animated propaganda films, government-made education films, messages from major corporations, and the first advertisements showing the ideology and manipulation concealed by the American dream. The archive is also one of the most comprehensive examples of digital preservation and dissemination, with around 7,000 digitised titles, accessible in the public domain free of charge through its association with the Internet Archive project since 2002. Its accessibility and the interest in its content have seen it become a perpetual source of information and inspiration for artists and film-makers like Guy Maddin and Adam Curtis.
This session features a number of film screenings, including home movies and other films made by corporations and government agencies, reflecting the consumerism, paranoia and obsession with the future in twentieth-century US culture. The films are only a taster of the 500,000-plus films produced in the USA in this period to promote not only the consumption of products characterising a set way of life, but also to turn Americans into voracious consumers, law-abiding citizens, model students, and children that adhere to marked gender patterns. Although their messages struggle to influence today’s worldly public, these films represent a kind of cinema that is still trying, just as it did sixty years ago, to uphold the American dream, in its firm belief in the capacity for a conflict-free world, its faith in the private company and capitalism as promises of a better future, and its optimistic and finalised view of history, where the American people have their destiny mapped out.
Sunday, 17 March 2019 – 6pm
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
With a presentation of the Prelinger Archives by Rick Prelinger, who will comment on fragments of the following films:
Robert R. Snody
The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair
1939, colour, English, sound, 35mm transferred to digital, 55’
Produced by Audio Productions for the Westinghouse Electric Company
Anonymous
Home Movie: Beany’s Drive-In, Long Beach, California
1952-1953, colour, sound, original version, 16mm transferred to digital 8’19’’
Carl Urbano
A is for Atom
1953, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 15’
Produced by John Sutherland for the General Electric Company
Anonymous
The House in the Middle
1954, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 12’10’’
Produced by W.J. Enders and Associates for the National Clean Up-Paint-Fix Up Bureau, with the collaboration of the Federal Civil Defense Administration
Anonymous
Home movie: Las Vegas
1958, colour, sound, original version, 16mm transferred to digital, 4’
Carl Urbano
Destination Earth
1956, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 13’37’’
Produced by John Sutherland for the American Pretroleum Institute
Anonymous
Design for Dreaming
1956, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 9’16’’
Produced by MPO Productions for General Motors
Virginia Bell and Bert Spielvogel
In the Suburbs
1957, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 19’30’’
Produced by On Film, Inc. for Redbook Magazine
Anonymous
American Look
1958, colour, sound, original version, 35mm transferred to digital, 28’
Produced by Jam Handy for the Chevrolet Motor Company
Acknowledgements
Enlaces relacionados
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Rick Prelinger (Washington D.C., 1953) is an archivist, writer, film-maker and educator, and the founder of the Prelinger Archives. He is also the director of Panorama Ephemera (2004), a collage of sequences on lifestyles and American ideology, and the home movie More Road Trips? (2013) on experiences of the open road. His participatory project Lost Landscapes reconstructs, through home movies, urban memory in cities like San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland and Los Angeles. He is also a professor of cinema and digital media at the University of California.
![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
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.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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.
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.