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Monday, 22 January
Session 1
António Reis, Jaime, 1974
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 35´Jaime pays homage to the blurred figure of Jaime Fernandes, a deceased psychiatric patient in Lisbon who leaves behind hundreds of poignant drawings made in the last three years of his confinement. Cordeiro and Reis’s first film does not become ensnared in the usual traps – many of which are compatible – of presenting Jaime as abnormal; in other words, as a patient, not somebody who was imprisoned for thirty-eight years, or as an outsider, not a poor person, as a brut artist and not as a farmer. Following the screening, Manuel Asín, curator of this film series, will develop a presentation on the filmic model of Reis and Cordeiro.
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Tuesday, 23 January
Panel: The image of the people. The cinema of Reis and Cordeiro With the participation of José Manuel Costa, Vítor Gonçalves and Jaime Pena
With the participation of José Manuel Costa, Vítor Gonçalves and Jaime Pena
The work of Reis and Cordeiro has been used to build a genealogy of the prestigious contemporary auteur-cinema in Portugal, also to propose a poetic counter-history of popular cinema, in its dual political and ethnographic meaning. Oblivious to the paternalist praise of poverty during the dictatorship of Salazar, Reis and Cordeiro pose an image of the people inseparable from myth, common knowledge and social history. This panel debates their artistic proposal, with the participation of José Manuel Costa, director of the Portuguese Cinemateca, Vítor Gonçalves, filmmaker, screenwriter, producer and member of the so-called School of Reis, and Jaime Pena, film critic and Head of Programming at the CGAI (Galician Center of Arts of Imaxe).
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Wednesday, 24 January
Session 2
Manoel de Oliveira Acto da primavera [Rite of Spring,], 1962
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 90´António Reis’s first professional work was as assistant director on a film that marked a shift in Manoel de Oliveira’s film-making after twenty-one years of forced silence. The film focuses on the recording of a medieval mystery on the Passion of Christ represented in a small mountain village. This prompted Oliveira to reflect on the conventions of representation and the specific characteristics of words in cinema, and the experience would have a lasting effect on Reis and on his film’s as a director, if only to disassociate himself from it.
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Friday, 26 January
Session 3
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Trás-os-Montes, 1976
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 111´The theme running through Trás-os-Montes is the architecture — in the broadest sense of the word —of one of the poorest and remotest regions in Portugal which is becoming depopulated through the emigration of adults to the capital or other European cities. The film offers a panorama of the multiple lifestyles of rural life, in contrast to the fate that looms with progress; the fate of disappearance: cyclical lyricism of traditional imagination under threat from the rhetoric of history.
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Monday, 29 January
Session 4
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Ana, 1982
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 114´In Trás-os-Montes the centrepiece was place — in some ways imposing itself on humans — whereas landscape is personified in this film in the figure of Ana, Margarida Cordeiro’s mother. The result is introspection, a collection of mental images tracing a parallel between a symbolic, non-narrative portrait of a character and her environment.
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Wednesday, 31 January
Session 5
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Rosa de Areia, 1989
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 88´“5,000-year flashbacks”, Joris Ivens said about Ana. The film-makers took note and in Rosa de Areia spatial, temporary and symbolic exploration of the region has even broader strokes, with the disproportionate scale of relations — from the cosmic to the microscopic — losing its footing. “A film to see and hear as though it were for the first time, as though it were the first film to come out of the earth and talk about it”, according to Margarida Cordeiro.
Held on 22, 24, 26, 29, 31 Jan 2018
Margarida Cordeiro (1939) and António Reis (1927–1991) are two path-breaking figures in the Portuguese cinema that emerged in the wake of the rebellion of 24 April 1974. Their films, which operated outside the prevailing urban movements taking place, invented a filmic language that was at once poetic and hypnotic, a style and sensibility that would pave a long tradition of radical cinema in Portugal.
In Portugal António Reis is seen as a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema and a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s, his poetry previously shining when Manoel de Oliveira invited him and Paulo Rocha to work on his first radical masterpiece, Rite of Spring (1962). The ethnographic and poetic cinema defined by Oliveira and Reis would later impact on the four works Reis directed with his wife, psychiatrist Margarida Cordeiro, which are screened in this series alongside Rite of Spring. The Museo Reina Sofía will, therefore, dig even deeper into the exploration of the auteur cinema that has shaped its programming in recent years, thus setting up continuities and relationships with the comprehensive retrospective on Straub and Huillet – huge admirers of these film-makers – held in 2016.
A large part of the revolutionary cinema in Portugal after Salazar’s dictatorship was markedly urban, yet Cordeiro and Reis emphatically went against the grain, moving away from urban landscapes towards the inland emigration that was distorting the country. With impoverished farm workers arriving in the capital every day after serving in the Colonial War or living in squalor in outlying villages, the film-makers deliberately wandered away from the city, working instead on the material and mythical structure of the remotest region depopulated by those leaving: Trás-os-Montes.
This unequivocal gesture was a provocation: the new democratic leaders had to understand the dialectic between aesthetic wealth and material poverty that determined the ways of life of the people they were representing. The film-makers set out to show how the symbols of the country’s poorest and most afflicted region, the most dispossessed, were those that had manifestly endured over time.
As with the revolutionary hindsight of Straub and Huillet, in Cordeiro and Reis there was a refusal to separate the nascent work from the one refusing to die, and they explored rural microcosms in a way that could be deemed anthropological, despite constituting a heterodox anthropology. In Reis’s words, “nobody can know what’s involved in making a film of this kind. It involves a body-to-body struggle between ancestral and ultramodern forms, between wolves and a Peugeot 504, between Neolithic ploughs and gas cylinders”.
The overlapping scenes form a kind of stratigraphy, with the shots cutting through successive layers of time in history, through everyday time. The work brings to mind the weaving of a mottled tapestry, assembling cloth from different ages, the sequences often operating around a feeling of touch – almost unique in the history of film — and a refinement in the symbolism of colour as an element which can create rhymes and distant relationships. The labyrinthine composition of Cordeiro and Reis’s films, which disorientated and fascinated contemporaries such as Jean Rouch, Joris Ivens and Jacques Rivette, does not abide by fantasies of reality, but rather adheres to the need to reproduce it in a profound, coherent order, “as though time never existed”, as Manoel de Oliveira put it.
This film series presents their work as a whole, described as brief and radical, poetic and popular, decisive and pivotal to the identity of contemporary Portuguese cinema by film-makers such as Pedro Costa, João Cesar Monteiro and João Pedro Rodrigues.
All screenings are in OV with Spanish subtitles.
Curatorship
Manuel Asín
Program
Documentos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela addresses the trauma of apartheid from both aesthetic and oneiric perspectives. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.