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Monday, 23 May 2022 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 1. Opening Lecture
TicketsThe Inequation of Prime Numbers
—Conducted by Gonzalo García-PelayoMathematics as a measurement of chance is behind major avant-garde art operations in the twentieth-century, such as Dadaism, Calculated Abstraction or Process Art. García-Pelayo would embark upon a similar path to Marcel Duchamp when he decided to turn a material accident, the factory specs of roulette tables, into a predictive method that would see him win in casinos around the world. It would also result in him being banned from different casinos, a battle the film-maker would later win in court, and lead to the manufacturing of new “anti-Pelayo” tables. In this master lecture, the film-maker picks apart the mathematical formula that has most interested him, that which expresses the primality of numbers; that is, a paradigm that is not based on what it is, equality or even numbers, but rather what it isn’t, the inequality of odd numbers. “For me, this formula has an aesthetic connection with my considerations inside counterculture, given that it would be an inequation of official culture”, the film-maker asserts.
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Wednesday, 25 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 10 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Seville, Counterculture Capital, Despite the Sorrows
TicketsGonzalo García-Pelayo. Smash and Gong in Dom Gonzalo
Spain, 1968, colour, original version in Spanish, Super-8 transferred to digital, 4’30’’Juana Dolores. Miss Universe
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 14’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Living in Seville
Spain, 1978, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 108'—Featuring a conversation between Gonzalo García-Pelayo and Paulino Viota in the second part
There is a counterculture that is unmistakeably southern — chaotic, carnivalesque, marginal, working class — with Seville its epicentre and its beginnings the Dom Gonzalo night club, founded by Gonzalo García-Pelayo in 1968. The session begins with the only existing Super-8 footage of this setting, shot by García-Pelayo, and with a Smash and Gong concert, two legendary bands that fused psychodelia and flamenco, a musical combination which the film-maker, also a music producer, worked on decisively. Living in Seville is a film-paean which outlines the instability of transition-to-democracy Spain (abuses of police power, squats, workers’ strikes) with an irrepressible urge to live and love. With echoes of Jean-Luc Godard in terms of youth and passion — Miguel is torn between Ana and Teresa — and also Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet in the use of language and directing actors, Living in Seville culminates in a reading of the Spanish Constitution, casting light on new cinema for a new era. The first of these sessions concludes with a talk by Juana Dolores on eroticism, inspired by Godard’s Masculin Féminin, and the sexual theories of Georges Bataille.
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Friday, 27 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Saturday, 11 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. Mad Love
TicketsJosé Luis Tirado. Mother, Saint, Whore
Spain, 2019, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 24’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Manuela
Spain, 1975, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 98'—A concert performed by Laura Merchal in homage to Manuela in the second part
The session opens with a medium-length film by fellow Seville native José Luis Tirado, a work which explores the three roles monotheistic religions attribute to women — the giver of life, the carer and the whore provocateur of male desire — still substantially rooted and visible in contemporary patriarchal society. García-Pelayo’s film Manuela, meanwhile, played by Charo López — or maybe Charo López played by Manuela given the confusion between character and actress — is archetypal of these three roles. It is the director’s first film in an undertaking to make a film version of the same-titled novel by Manuel Halcón and would be the most commercial and arguably conventional of his entire filmography. Yet Pelayo manages to avoid prejudice or gender stereotypes to show the power of love as an implacable force amid the secular class struggles between tenant farmers and landowners that have dominated the Andalusian countryside throughout history. André Breton and his “mad love” and the sadistic imagery of Luis Buñuel hover over the film, although the wonderful flamenco dance at the beginning and the film’s transgressive ending with the most forbidden of taboos stare down any kind of reference point.
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Saturday, 28 May 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Thursday, 16 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. The Liberation of Desire
TicketsMarta Valverde. Mad Things(work in progress)
Spain, 2022, colour, original version in Spanish and audio with a live intervention by the film-maker, DA, 22’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Seafront
Spain, 1979, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 84'Philosophical reflections which start from the quotidian and bodies freed in their desires, for, as García-Pelayo’s films remind us, revolution cannot exist without the emancipation of desires. Considered by Paulino Viota, a widely recognised maestro for the film-maker, to be “the most intelligent film in Spanish cinema”, three couples arrange to meet at a seafront house to engage in partner-swapping and, in passing, commemorate the burial of conservative double standards from the dictatorship. More than forty years on, this freedom contrasts with Mad Things, the personal diary of Marina, a 26-year-old woman studying an MA in Contemporary Art while working as a prostitute: Marta Valverde’s work in progress straddles audiovisual practice and performance, in which the sordid and the banal mix with sex, and where business is the only outlook. The second session will see Marta Valverde produce a live version of the piece.
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Wednesday, 1 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 17 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 5. The Joys of Revolt
TicketsIan de la Rosa. Farrucas
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 17’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Joyous Spunking
Spain, 1982, colour, original version in Spanish with French subtitles, DA, 72’—The first session features a conversation with Gonzalo García-Pelayo, moderated by film-maker María Gisèle Royo and artist Julia de Castro, the creators of a film-homage to Joyous Spunking. The second session features a conversation with Javier García-Pelayo.
The authenticity of the margins or the notion of difference experienced by Andalusian bulerías. Farrucas is the second feature-length film by young trans director Ian de la Rosa and depicts four gypsy and Moroccan teenage girls in the impoverished neighbourhood of El Puche in Almería. The hybrid identities of gender and race and those who gaze and those whom are gazed at combine with the desires and yearnings of these young women. Joyous Spunking, meanwhile, is a lo-fi road movie on the friendship between two lower-class anti-heroes and escape as a movement which gives life meaning. In the film, with its high tempo and music crossing the underground and the vernacular —two sides of the same coin for Gonzalo García-Pelayo— a gallery of glorious and incorruptible misfits swirl.
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Thursday, 2 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 24 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 6. Between Ritual and Festivity I
TicketsIgnacio Guarderas. The Road to Rocío
Spain, 2020, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 20’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Rocío and José
Spain, 1982, colour, original version in Spanish with French subtitles, DA, 85’—A concert performed by the rociero group Madrid in homage to Rocío y José in the second part
Andalusian counterculture feeds off contradictions. Thus, there is nothing strange in the heretic and ultraorthodox church of El Palmar de Troya appearing in the underground fresco Living in Seville, in much the same way as this homage to the road to El Rocío. Synthesising the impressions of Gonzalo García-Pelayo’s twelve years of pilgrimage, Rocío and José looks at two brothers, one starting adolescence, the other well into adulthood, and how love arises for the younger one, José. On the flipside of the carnal desire of his early films, in Rocío and José landscape, the sounds of the road and sevillanas shape a mystical and ascetic poem. The session opens with Ignacio Guarderas, who carries on this anthropological gaze at El Rocío in a medium-length film on two screens which ranges over the stereotype-free natural and human landscape.
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Monday, 13 June 2022 – 7pm / Second session: Saturday, 25 June 2022 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 7. Between Ritual and Festivity II
TicketsConcha Barquero y Alejandro Alvarado. Descartes
Spain, 2021, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 21’Gonzalo García-Pelayo. Three Roads to Rocío
Spain, 1986, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 53’. Courtesy of RTVE—A presentation by Álvaro Arroba in the first part
Two films on the same theme shape the recent history of independent Spanish documentary-making: García-Pelayo’s Three Roads to Rocío and Rocío (1980), Fernando Ruiz Vergara’s censored film. In this session, Descartes is screened, a documentary made from the film reels of this film rejected by the film-maker and found by Barquero and Alvarado recently in the archive of Filmoteca Española. Both films and their epigones respond to two ways of living: Protestant and Catholic, as García-Pelayo asserts. The first renounces mundane pleasure over the fear of guilt or the manipulative ends that hide these pleasures. The second participates in the sensuality offered by these pleasures and being aware that, although they abide by dark ideological interests, glee always deserves penance. There is an issue with Ruiz Vergara’s Rocío: “he is the Protestant version, and I am the Catholic version”, García-Pelayo claims. This session denotes a clash between both belief systems.
Stop Prohibiting Because I Can’t Disobey Everything
The Films of Gonzalo García-Pelayo
Held on 23, 25, 27, 28, 30 May, 01, 02, 06, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 20, 24, 25 Jun 2022
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986. A cult film-maker, club promoter, music producer, professional gambler, editor and a speculator in the contemporary immaterial economy, García-Pelayo fits multiples lives into one. The facets mentioned condense a personal concept of film, understood as a form of existence based on vitalism, limitless desire, occurrences as a narrative strategy and insubordination to predictability, be it on a formal or political level.
The retrospective bears the title of the first of eleven contemporary films García-Pelayo made over twelve months, between 2021 and 2022, during “the year of eleven films” as he calls it. An unmatched tour de force that demonstrates how film is a way of life, first and foremost, before an industry or profession. These eleven productions are screened in the second part of this series, during September 2022. The title of the programme is also the slogan that best defines García-Pelayo’s filmic corpus and explains with greater clarity a fascination the film-maker has ignited among a young generation of film-makers, artists and producers who have retrieved his body of work, viewing it as the keystone of a heterodox genealogy of Spanish film-making since the 1970s, as well as a model with which to confront a numb society.
The historical films this series assembles are set in Spain’s changing, tumultuous society during the Transition to democracy, in the wake of the death of Francisco Franco and the country joining the European Economic Community (1975–1986). A time in which the cracks of the dictatorship’s political authoritarianism and moral conservatism reach the force of a thriving counterculture and youth’s utopian yearning to build a new society, qualities that run through García-Pelayo’s film-making. With this framework in mind, the series dispenses with a traditional historicist and revisionist orientation to situate the film-maker in a contemporary dialogue, in thematic sessions, with young artists and producers, his major themes reverberating among them: sex as a free territory, misfits and the socially marginalised as lucid and honest anti-heroes, the radical co-existence of the exalted and the popular and music — flamenco, psychodelia, sevillanas — as an eruption of the real in fiction. Among it all is a kindred spirit which transgresses forms and the limits of a self-righteous society in 1975. Or 2022 for that matter.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (19th International Film Festival)
Curators
Chema González (Museo Reina Sofía) and Luis E. Parés (Cineteca Madrid)
Inside the framework of
TIZ 3. Political Matter
Más actividades
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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.