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February 7, 2015 La Casa Encendida, Audiovisual Room
Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort
Psyche. 16mm film, 1947, colour, sound, 24 min.
Lysis. 16mm film, 1948, colour, sound, 25 min.
Charmides. 16mm film, 1948, colour, sound, 11 min.
Presentation by Mark Webber, editor of the book Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos (The Visible Press, 2014) and independent programmer.
Psyche, Lysis and Charmides make up the trilogy Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, branded “degenerate” by critics at the time as it openly explored the awakening of homosexual desire in the repressive moral climate of the 1950s. In his first 16mm film, Markopoulos took inspiration from the unfinished novel Psyche, by Pierre Louÿs, which starts and finishes with a door opening and closing ( he goes in a boy and comes out a man ). An inaudible encounter and an illegible letter submerge the viewer in unconscious associations: changing colours on the screen reveal the true character, with psychosexual states (narcissism and homosexuality), erotic symbols and cine-trance (somnambulism, dreams, hypnosis). Assembled with only a magnifying glass, tape and a razorblade, the spine of these films supports a love for places (Hollywood Hills) and people (the actors were chosen because of their appearance and form of expression). Lysis and Charmides, meanwhile, were inspired by Plato’s dialogues on friendship and temperance; filmed in Ohio, both affirm the possibilities of myth in modernity and celebrate a new montage: Lysis is filmed entirely in sequences, practically without discards, while Charmides represents the consistency of film as film.
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February 8, 2015 La Casa Encendida, Audiovisual Room
Gammelion
Bliss. 16mm film, 1967, colour, sound, 6 min.
Gammelion. 16mm film, 1968, colour, sound, 54 min.
In June of 1967, Markopoulos visited the Byzantine chapel San Juan Bautista on the island of Hidra. Three months later, he returned for the second time to the Castello di Roccasinibalda, which he had become obsessed with in a previous trip to Italy. Bliss and Gammelion stem from two overwhelming places with various limitations: time (1 or 2 days of filming), materials (only two reels in each film) and light (only natural light). In Bliss he selects the first composition (the door of the church) on which he films the subsequent overlaps, cutting and assembling as though the camera were a chisel. In Gammelion, as with the frescoes or the dome in Bliss, he passes through rooms, hallways, walls, and gardens. Markopoulos didn’t film his first screenplay, which was inspired by the surrealist novel Au château d’Argol, since the author, Julien Gracq, refused to give authorisation, considering the project too esoteric. Filming the whole castle in segments of less than 30cms, on the second day he explores some of the same places, taking new shots with the morning light. At the time of assembling the film, he chose to turn these five minutes of footage into a one-hour film, using systematic interstices in opaque white (fade out) and black (fade in), accompanied by a soundtrack with music by Roussel and the verses of Rilke.
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February 9, 2015 Museo Reina Sofía. Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Portraits
Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill. 16mm film, 1967, colour, sound, 14 min.
Political Portraits. 16mm film, 1969, colour, 12 min (fragment).
The Olympian. 16mm film, 1969, colour, silent, 23 min.
Gilbert and George. 16mm film, 1975, colour, silent, 12 min.
Presentation by Arnau Vilaró, historian, film critic and member of the editorial board of the publication Lumière.
Between two significant portrait films, Galaxie and Political Portraits, Markopoulos filmed the painter and poet Mark Turbyfill over the course of six hours. Through improvisation a definitive form was found in the process itself and in the camera montage. As in Gilbert & George, these portraits do not strive to identify so much as reveal every piece of film as a vessel of continuous time. In Political Portraits, he travelled around Europe to film Chirico and Nureyev: these portraits denote the humanist and complex reverse of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Although the relaxed feel and the rhythm of New York differ in Galaxie, the running time of the portrait still corresponds in terms of rolls of film. At the beginning of the original film Markopoulos read a fragment from Valéry’s L'Homme et la nuit, while, subsequently, in The Olympian he mounted a portrait of Alberto Moravia in his Rome balcony with fades to black.
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February 10, 2015 Museo Reina Sofía. Sabatini Building, Auditorium
The Illiac Passion
The Illiac Passion. 16mm film, 1964–67, colour, sound, 91 min.
Over the course of his life, Markopoulos returned to Greek mythology time and again. This film, one of his most acclaimed, constitutes a visionary reinterpretation of Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, interpreted by new mythical subjects from the North American underground in the 1960s. Narcissus, Icarus, Daedalus, Apollo, Venus and Adonis were erotic starting points to wander through the emotion of certain actors – Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga, Gregory Battcock, Paul Swan or even Andy Warhol, who formed a decentralised framework of scenes around Central Park. Bound, freed in different versions, transformed into molecules, these bodies, symbols of desire or opposing binomial, Markopoulos wrote, rhyming with the musicality of chosen lenses or the paused reading of the film-maker in the translation of myth carried out by Henry David Thoreau. The impossibility of making a copy of the first three-hour version is one of the renunciations that resulted in Markopoulos leaving for Europe.
Film as Film: the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Held on 07, 08, 09, 10 Feb 2015
This film series presents a selection of work by Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992), who made some of the most subjective and allegorical film poetics in post-war experimental cinema. With four sessions screened in both La Casa Encendida and the Museo Reina Sofía, this series is also the outcome of a collaboration between an extensive international network of arts centres and film institutes which, co-occurring with the publication of the director’s writings, endeavours to review a body of work that joins formal experimentation and individual mythology.
A contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren, Gregory J. Markopulos (1928–1992) was born in the USA to Greek emigrants, a sensibility and foreign condition that would underlie his constant trips to Europe from the 1950s onwards, bringing him into contact with Jean Cocteau and establishing a hermetic and narcissistic sense of cultural tradition. After Psyche (1947), his first 16mm film, Markopoulos built his own cinematic space, articulated by biographical narration and the translation and contemporary reinterpretation of mythological, literary and musical sources. This series introduces the keys to sensual and excessive poetics, in which homosexual identity, initiation rites and allegory circle around complex editing techniques and spontaneously superimposed images.
Disillusioned with the possibilities of the post-war Avant-garde and sceptical about the role of institutions, audience and circles of experimental cinema, Markopoulos set out for Europe for good in 1967, withdrawing his films from circulation and, in the process, turning his work into an elusive cult object. With the notion that the film-maker must be responsible for every aspect of their work, he conceived Temenos, a space of pilgrimage and monographic archive to present, restore and study his films, located in Arcadia, Greece, the place of his birth. The culmination of this project can be seen in Eniaios: twenty-two eighty-hour cycles reassembling his work and replacing sound with the mental rhythm brought about by the speed of brief images between black and white passages. Since 2004, this total artwork project has been screened every four years and represents a celebration of cinema. Markopoulos’ life is well documented and continues to resonate with the words he would quote from Mircea Eliade: The whole man is engaged when he listens to myths and legends; consciously or not, their message is always deciphered and absorbed in the end.
In collaboration with
the publications Lumière and The Visible Press, with special thanks to Robert Beavers and Temenos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and La Casa Encendida
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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 Feni’s work. 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 Museum’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24th March, 2026 – 6.30pm
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). 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 Museum from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.