Summer Cinema
Held on 05, 06, 12, 13, 19, 20, 26, 27 jul, 02, 03, 09, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24, 30, 31 ago 2024
The Museo Reina Sofía’s outdoor summer cinema series returns, once again, in the Sabatini Building Garden throughout the months of July and August. The subject matter of this year’s edition explores how film reflects on itself or, similarly: how film thinks about film. From its origins to the present day, the film medium has explored its own nature from different perspectives: as a magical phenomenon of light and time, as a creative obsession, as an industry with its trades, conditions and precarities or as a series of narrations that depict a community.
The series orbits around nine themed programmes that explore questions on the construction of the actress on and off screen, Hollywood’s dark side, paeans for the cinematography of non-hegemonic geographies, the film-maker as an accursed artist, film as a way of living and feeling, film theatres as a reflection of a dying-breed urban and human landscape and comedy as a genre which, from joke to joke, blurs fiction’s limits. By way of diverse works, from different eras and contexts, from independent to classical cinema and from fiction to essay film, this film season seeks to convene a plural history of the medium and, in so doing, contribute to reflections around it.
Curators
Chema González, Víctor Losilla and Lucía Salas
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
Sponsor
Actresses and their mythology and rise to stardom have been a mainstay of classical Hollywood cinema and the melodrama genre. This programme contains two classics of the genre about actresses and women fighting for survival: Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother), which, twenty-five years on from its premiere, has lost none of its force, and Todd Haynes’s May December, one of the films of this past year.
Friday, 5 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Pedro Almodóvar. Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother)
Spain, 1999, colour, original version in Spanish, 101’
— Presented by the film’s director, Pedro Almodóvar
In a male-dominated world, all women are actresses: they represent a role to be moulded around the expectations and projections of others. With this idea in mind, Pedro Almodóvar wrote the story of Manuela (played by Cecilia Roth), a single mother who sees her son killed in a road accident on his seventeenth birthday. From this point on, she looks to fulfil the boy’s dream: to meet his father, whose existence she had always kept secret from him. And so Manuela embarks upon a journey through the ambiguity that characterises gender identity and all roles we represent in life. Todo sobre mi madre constitutes a remarkable homage to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands and Romy Schneider, and to all suffering actresses, mothers and women.
Saturday, 6 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Todd Haynes. May December
USA, 2023, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 115’
A young actress (played by Natalie Portman) visits an older woman (Julianne Moore) to research and prepare her leading role in a film about the woman’s life and her controversial relationship with her husband (Charles Melton), with whom she started a relationship when he was a teenager. The presence of the actress rocks the woman’s family dynamics to offer a reflection on the different roles we play, day to day, and the motivations and emotions we conceal. The themes of this recently premiered work — one of the films of the year — engage in a whispered conversation with those of Todo sobre mi madre.
This second programme comprises two portraits of Los Angeles which oscillate between dream and nightmare, taking as their point of departure two of the city’s most iconic roads, Sunset Boulevard, a thoroughfare which links the city centre to an opulent coastal area by the Santa Monica Mountains, and Mulholland Drive, a winding road that skirts the mansions of the rich and famous.
Friday, 12 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Billy Wilder. Sunset Boulevard
USA, 1950, black and white, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 110’
Sunset Boulevard connects two contrasting areas of Los Angeles: the centre and the sea. Along its near 24 miles are residential areas, iconic nightclubs, major commercial areas, cinemas and endless stately homes. The road was chosen by director Billy Wilder to situate the rise-and-fall story of two characters: the down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden), and a forgotten star of Hollywood’s silent cinema, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). In the film, the city and film industry become a factory of nightmares for the two characters, who embark upon a downward spiral towards destruction.
Saturday, 13 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
David Lynch. Mulholland Drive
USA, 2001, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 147’
In Mulholland Drive, film-maker David Lynch creates an even more distorted mirror of Hollywood than its predecessor Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), choosing a more mysterious, darker and writhing road: Mulholland Drive, a street that seems to advance in circles, like the film itself. The story begins with an enigmatic woman, Rita (played by Laura Harring), who loses her memory after a car accident. Disorientated, she arrives at the apartment of Betty (Naomi Watts), a young, aspiring actress who is new to LA. The two women attempt to discover Rita’s identity, moving deep into this city of illusion and mystery, occupied by terrifying nightmares, film directors and hypnotic nightclubs, while the coordinates of time and space become ever more indecipherable.
This programme assembles two films against the amnesia threatening the memory of cinema and its country, namely Colombia and Lebanon, two territories that have lost a significant part of their film history. The selected films assemble patchworks of this memory to forge a link between what remains and what is missing.
Friday, 19 July 2024 Edificio Sabatini, Jardín (acceso: Edificio Sabatini, Entrada principal)
Jocelyne Saab. Kanya Ya Ma Kan, Beyrouth (Once Upon a Time in Beirut)
Lebanon, France, Germany and Argentina, 1995, colour, original version in Arabic, English and French with Spanish subtitles, 104'. Acknowledgements to the Association Jocelyne Saab
Two young friends, Yasmine and Leila, visit an old film collector, Mr Farouk, who lives in a secret place surrounded by fragments of the history of Lebanese cinema: posters, photographs, projectors, theatre seats, scripts and films from the early twentieth century, among them documentaries, early fiction films, musical melodramas and war reports. As Mr Farouk shows them the history of struggle in their city, Beirut, through footage, the young girls start to delve deeper, with the three producing a kind of montage. This exercise makes the history of the city palpable, allowing them not only to understand its complex past but also to project into the future the desire for a possible city.
Saturday, 20 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Luis Ospina y Jerónimo Atehortúa. Mudos testigos (Silent Witnesses)
Colombia, 2023, colour, original version in Spanish, 78’
— With a streamed presentation by one of the film’s directors, Jerónimo Atehortúa
The conserved remnants of the origins of Colombian cinema are few. In an exercise of recovering memory, film-makers Jerónimo Atehortúa and Luis Ospina assemble in this work fragments of films from Colombia’s silent cinema era to compose a three-act melodrama. Bit by bit, the film delves into absence: What is behind the melodrama of a poor boy who loves a girl who must marry a rich man? The film explores the history of the first half of the twentieth century in the country and the tensions between social classes in an exercise on the recovery of a near-lost filmic past.
For many directors, although film is a great source of pleasure, it is also capable of creating dangerous fixations. Under this premise, the fourth programme brings together two historical films which are wonderfully shot, each in their own particular way: while Llorenç Llobet Gràcia whispers about this risk in post-war Spain, Iván Zulueta screams it out during the Transition to democracy.
Friday, 26 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Llorenç Llobet Gràcia. Vida en sombras (Life in Shadows)
Spain, 1949, black and white, original version in Spanish, 90’. Acknowledgments to Filmoteca de Catalunya
With its rich filmic language, this work portrays the life of a man shaped by film who is born amid a screening and who, in each stage of life, experiences the best and worst of his obsession with the medium, a fixation that leads him to become a director and put his loved ones in danger at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Film is put forward as a kind of ambivalent love affair, generating dilemmas and manipulation as it also creates memorable images. The work, the only professional feature film made by amateur film-maker Llorenç Llobet-Gràcia, is a dramatised version of his life and with a standing in the history of Spanish film owing to its recovery in the 1970s and subsequent restoration in 2012.
Saturday, 27 July 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Iván Zulueta. Arrebato (Rapture)
Spain, 1979, colour, original version in Spanish, 110’
Museo Reina Sofía Collection
A cult film during the Transition to democracy period in Spain and Iván Zulueta’s magnum opus, Arrebato (Rapture) is about one film-maker who manages to cannibalise another, exploring cinema and an art that sucks blood, that devours. An art which, when turned into an obsession, is as addictive as a drug. Amid a creative block and relationship break-up, a film director receives a package with footage of an eccentric he knows. As he starts to see the images, they transform into both his main source of interest and difficulties given that the sender’s relationship to cinema is so macabre that it ends up impacting the protagonist, just as it affected Zulueta, who would not shoot another feature film after this work.
Programme number five gathers two recently made films in which making and living are inseparable. Both works think about film as it is being produced, depicting two crises: locked-down filming during the COVID-19 and a heartfelt mourning. The same question sweeps through the two pieces: Can film make us better?
Friday, 2 August 2024 - 10pm (cancelled due to weather incidents) / New session: Thursday, 22 August 2024 - 10pm Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Maureen Fazendeiro y Miguel Gomes. Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries)
Portugal, 2021, colour, original version in Portuguese with Spanish subtitles, 102’
Crista, Carloto and João spend the summer together, partying, building a butterfly house, sunbathing and building and knocking down routines in a country house. Yet this is not any old summer — it is the first of the COVID-19 pandemic and important for all three to construct illuminating routines. The three protagonists are actually part of a film crew locked down to make a film, a team who, small yet diverse, are more accustomed to shooting bright and breezy films outdoors and, when faced with this out of-the-ordinary situation, must find a way of dealing with the challenge together, leading them towards numerous discussions about cinema.
Saturday, 3 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
María Aparicio. Las cosas indefinidas (Undefined Things)
Argentina, 2023, colour, original version in Spanish, 81’
— With a streamed presentation by the film’s director, María Aparicio
Eva, the protagonist of this story, has been a film editor and teacher for a long time. She has always worked with friends, one of whom, Juan, dies suddenly before both finish editing a new short film. The loss engulfs everything: the classes, the days of editing, the conversations. In the meantime, Eva and Rami, her assistant, work on editing a film on blindness, defined by one of the characters as a backdrop of emptiness. And, in point of fact, Eva suffers from a kind of emotional blindness: she is moving towards a loss of faith in film. Las cosas indefinidas (Undefined Things) seeks to modestly return this faith in film to its protagonist through her work — the images of her film inside the film — her personal objects, her conversations and her friends.
The films chosen for this programme render a portrait of two adult cinemas: one in New York’s Times Square in 1983, the other in Madrid’s Tirso de Molina area in 2013. Two different eras of the circulation and consumption of pornographic images. And the main characters? The workers in these cinemas and some of their clientele. The film theatre is presented as the stage for dying-breed neighbourhoods and communities, as imperfect as they are beautifully human.
Friday, 9 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Bette Gordon. Variety
USA, 1983, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 97’. Acknowledgements to Play-Doc, Festival Internacional de Cine de Tui
—With a streamed presentation by the film’s director, Bette Gordon
In this thriller, set in New York’s Lower East Side, a vacant, dilapidated neighbourhood sent into decline by decades of neoliberal urban planning, Christine (played by Sandy McLeod), a woman with artistic ambitions, has money worries and is looking for a job. Her friend, played by artist Nan Goldin, tells her a downtown adult theatre needs a ticket-taker. Her place as the custodian of the theatre awakens in her certain obsessions which concur with the presence of a wealthy man (Richard M. Davidson) among the patrons, and a kind of mafia attraction Christine becomes fixated on, leading both to play a game of cat and mouse.
Saturday, 10 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Omar A. Razzak. Paradiso
Spain, 2013, colour, original version in Spanish, 70’
— With a presentation by Hola Vecinas, a cultural and social association from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood
The Duque de Alba cinema is the only adult theatre left in Madrid. The year is 2013, a time when films can be watched online, in the privacy of the home. The cinema only has a few loyal patrons left, and only a few employees, whose loyalty is even greater. Together they are a small family who even share moments together leading up to Christmas. The cinema is a space of affect and conversations about the medium (and all types of films); however, its days are numbered: the ticket-taker is on the verge of retirement and the area is beginning to feel the dreaded effects of gentrification. The film records its final days, and the bonds and the nooks of the space in a slowly vanishing community.
What is an actress and what mark does her body leave on history? In exploring two characters, the story of actress and singer Jane Birkin and the fictional Watermelon Woman, the films selected for this programme devoted to portraits, real or fictitious, think about film as the building of identities.
Friday, 16 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Agnès Varda. Jane B. par Agnès V. (Jane B. for Agnès V.)
France, 1988, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 97’
This film tells the story of how actress and singer Jane Birkin was apprehensive about her imminent fortieth birthday when Agnès Varda, close to sixty herself, told her that it was a beautiful age. Thereafter, they began work on this film, reflecting on the footprint Birkin had left in the world (and vice versa). The film assembles memories, recreations and inventions on her works, travels, daughters, partners, parents and places (English and French), with everything mixed in this unconfigured (“auto”)biography which raises the question: What is a portrait?
Saturday, 17 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Cheryl Dunye. The Watermelon Woman
USA, 1996, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 90’
— With a streamed presentation by Rioko Fotabon, a writer and anti-racist activist
The Watermelon Woman is a romantic comedy, a fiction about a fictitious archive, among many other things. Cheryl (played by the film’s director, Cheryl Dunye) is a Black lesbian woman who wants to be a film-maker. She works with her friend and partner in a video rental store, with both also doing weddings and birthdays to gain experience, money and equipment in the hope that, at some point, it might kick-start their film-making. Interested in the presence of Black women in film history, Cheryl starts to watch films featuring Black actresses, particularly those from the 1930s and 1940s, and, consequently, discovers Fae Richards, the Watermelon Woman, an actress she had never heard about. As she interviews specialists, viewers and her relatives, Cheryl discovers that Richards was, like her, a lesbian, heightening her interest further. Her investigation subsequently becomes a film of archive adventures.
Film-makers, like most artists, draw from numerous methods to find inspiration. Travel is the chosen formula of the protagonists in the two films making up this programme, showing us how classical American film and today’s European auteur cinema explore, deep down, the same ideas.
Friday, 23 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Mia Hansen-Løve. Bergman Island
France, 2021, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 112’
In Bergman Island a film-making couple, suspiciously like the marriage of Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, a film-maker and huge admirer of Ingmar Bergman’s work, travel to the island of Fårö, in Sweden, to find inspiration and write their next feature film, living and working as the Swedish director did. With a lightness of touch and tenderness, Hansen-Løve films this homage to summer and the more pleasant and vitalist side of Bergman, as captured in Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1953). The film maintains that creation and life are connected and that both have their sweet and agreeable moments.
Saturday, 24 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Preston Sturges. Sullivan’s Travels
USA, 1941, black and white, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 90’
John L. Sullivan (played by Joel Albert McCrea), a successful film director who specialises in comedies, wants to take his career in a different direction and looks for inspiration to write his first drama. To gain an idea of the more impoverished side of the USA, still shaken by the Great Depression, he decides to dress accordingly and travel the country working precarious and temporary jobs. His exploits, however, are proof that the shift required is more mental than physical. At once a road movie and romantic comedy, Sullivan’s Travels is a film about the power of fiction and the self-portrait of a director who wants to champion comedy, even after the devastating Crash of ‘29.
The final programme in the series presents three comedies which confront, with humorous tones, the world of film by way of two of the best comics in the history of cinema: Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis. Keaton plays a projectionist and an actor affected by the passing of time; Lewis a “mister nobody” who will be moulded to become a star.
Friday, 30 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Alan Schneider y Samuel Beckett. Film
USA, 1965, black and white, original version without dialogue, 22’
Buster Keaton. Sherlock Jr.
USA, 1924, black and white, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 45’
This session brings together two films centred on Buster Keaton, whose expression has been recorded in multiple forms across the history of the medium. In Sherlock Jr., a fresh-faced projectionist, played by Keaton, looks to cinema to learn about life, yet, ultimately, he overdoses on learning, to such a degree that he sees film in every corner of reality. In love with a girl with another suitor, he starts to imagine himself inside a detective film, his awkwardness triggering all number of risible accidents. Film, meanwhile, shot forty years later, is the first and only film by writer and playwright Samuel Beckett. The work focuses on the eye of the camera, perception, time and the body of the actor.
Saturday, 31 August 2024 Sabatini Building, Garden (access: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance)
Jerry Lewis. The Patsy
USA, 1964, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 101’
This film is a portrait of Hollywood as a relentless manufacturer of the show: an exercise in film within film, similar to a game of Russian dolls. A famous comedian dies in a plane crash, with his entourage — his team of writers, assistants, managers and administrators — concerned that they will be without work and a source of income. It is at this point that Stanley Belt enters the scene, played by Jerry Lewis, an unwittingly heavy-handed, chaotic and highly amusing character. It is obvious that Stanley is talentless, yet the machinery of showtime possesses all the tools to forcibly send him into homes around the world through television. As is common in Lewis’s other works, we find ourselves before a great comedy with agonising undertones.
8 OCT 2025,24 JUN 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.
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.
10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31 OCT, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30 NOV, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30 DIC 2024,2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31 ENE, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28 FEB, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31 MAR, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28 ABR, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31 MAY, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30 JUN, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31 JUL, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30 AGO, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29 SEP, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30 OCT 2025
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.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
29 SEP, 2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight two-hour sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of four sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes four sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios; and international law, through the work of British writer China Miéville.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.
![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)