The History and Roots of Samba

Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.  

The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.      

The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.  

These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists. 

This year’s opening night of the fifteenth edition of the Márgenes International Contemporary Film Festival will take place inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The inaugural session will witness artists Neutro Gris and Nodoaviom perform, live and for the first time, the multimedia performance Music 4 Salvation, which extends their language towards a sensorial experience fusing sound, image and digital emotion.

Music 4 Salvation unfolds as a sound and visual collage in which different strands are linked in one sole narrative of youth and adulthood, notions from which the piece puts forward a second reading of popular symbology and iconography and culminates by evoking the transitional time between these two stages of life. And all from a post-internet gaze and found footage aesthetics. 

The Márgenes Festival is held from 23 to 30 November in Madrid and shines a light on innovative initiatives that combine up-and-coming and acclaimed talent. Its film programme explores the convergence of cinema, the visual arts and sound art with approaches that expand the limits of the film experience, encompassing screenings, audiovisual shows, performances, encounters and sessions for children. In addition to the opening event, the Museo also welcomes, among the organised activities this year, the series Emotional Interface. The Films of Metahaven.

The International Festival of LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Madrid (QueerCineMad) and the Museo Reina Sofía come together to organise a retrospective on Ira Sachs (USA, 1965), a pivotal film-maker in contemporary queer cinema whose work has charted, across three decades, the affects, losses and resistance that traverse the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sachs is the creator of a filmography which conceives of New York as the emotional architecture of his narratives, and as a space of memory, struggle and community. This programme includes the premiere of his most recent film, Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), in Madrid, with the film-maker in attendance in three of its sessions.   

Sachs has filmed, with delicacy and conviction, the tensions between desire, precarity and belonging, from his first feature-length film, The Delta (1996), set on the margins of the Mississippi, to Love Is Strange (2014), where a gay couple have to give up their Manhattan apartment after marrying. In Keep the Lights On (2012) intimacy becomes a battleground in confronting addiction and neglect, while Lady (1994), a short film on the solitude of an elderly woman in New York, anticipates his sensibility for bodies made invisible. Last Address (2010) is a silent homage to queer artists who died from AIDS/HIV-related illnesses — Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz — whereby the façades of the buildings they lived in become intimate monuments, the remnants of history erased through windows. Thus, Ira Sachs’s body of work engages in a profound dialogue with film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder in situating the gaze at the centre of bodies, in exploring the complexity of the struggle between himself and his films. Further, his practice reverberates through New Queer Cinema, a 1990s film movement that transformed the representation of sexuality from difference.  

The director’s presence in Madrid, coupled with the premiere of his new work, makes this film season an event which extols both his career and his form of gazing and inhabiting the city from the queer, the community and the poetic. In these times of eviction and urban homogenisation, Sachs’s film-making reminds us that the neighbourhood can also be a gesture of care, a form of resistance, a future promise.

Museo Situado and the Maloka Brazilian Cultural Association come together to offer this artistic, historical and social activity in conjunction with Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, which pays homage to Dandara and Zumbi dos Palmares, universal symbols of Afro-Brazilian resistance and the fight against slavery.

In the activity, dance, poetry and performance become tools of memory and resistance via a programme which surveys the history of samba, from its origins in Bahia to its consolidation in Rio de Janeiro. It features the participation of more than ten Brazilian artists and pays homage to key figures in samba such as Tia Ciata, Clementina de Jesús, Cartola, Dona Ivone Lara, Elza Soares, Martinho da Vila and Alcione.

Further, the event seeks to shine a light on the richness of Afro-Brazilian culture while opening a space of reflection on resistance to racism throughout history and today, as well as inequality and disregard. In the words of philosopher Sueli Carneiro (2000), “the fight for the rights of black women and the community of African descent is inseparable from the rescue of history and the memory of our ancestors”. It is an artistic and vindicatory celebration that invites the whole community to aquilombarse: to come together, celebrate and affirm collective memory, for, as sociologist Florestan Fernandes (1976) affirmed, “the history of peoples of African descent can only be understood through the active resistance to oppression”. Long live Dandara. Long live Zumbi. Long live Afro-Brazilian ancestry.