
Giuliana Racco, High Roads, 2022, película
Held on 21 May 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the idea of the monstrous.
This final session is centred on High Roads (Giuliana Racco, 2022), a film which displaces the gaze, shifting it from the major accounts of genocide in Palestine towards daily forms of resistance. By way of four Palestinian women who play sport, breathe, and practice other bodily disciplines in a context marked by Israeli military occupation, the film shows how care, persistence and community-building can become political practices. High Roads, therefore, connects with the idea of the “magic yes” via the decision to keep on producing well-being, movement and ties in conditions that conspire against it. It also puts forward a form of decentralisation: resistance appears not in institutions or official discourses, but in bodies, affects and shared gestures.
The session unfolds through films that practise ways of deviating from the institutional axis and activate other modes of looking, playing, resisting and organising collectively. Through masks, altered rules, corporeal fictions and daily practices of care, the pieces work with situations where an acceptance of the improbable or the strange is a kind of “magic yes”: a gesture which allows something to be displaced and transformed within a context of hegemony.
The museum thus no longer appears as a fixed place from which to order culture, becoming instead a space traversed by other rules, temporalities and ways of inhabiting the commons. The films assembled in the session displace the gaze towards what normally remains outside: peripheral territories, hybrid practices and clumsy gestures which, however, are full of intent or forms of organisation distanced from dominant codes. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, the rough, the precarious and the strange appear here as legitimate forms of making and showing culture.
The idea is less about affirming a new centrality than opening a question about what happens when central authority is destabilised and other sensibilities, bodies and imaginaries enter the stage. Films that, rather than offering closed responses and looking for consensus, experiment with different ways of inhabiting the museum and producing common space.
Collaboration
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 28 may 2026 a las 17:30
Giuliana Racco. High Roads
Spain and Palestine, 2022, DA, colour, sound, original version with Spanish subtitles, 18’40’’
— Presentation by and talk with Galaxxia and members of equipoMotor “a little more Frankenstein”
Participants
equipoMotor «un poco más Frankenstein»
(2025–2026) is made up of seventeen participants with diverse backgrounds in terms of age, professional trajectories and training. Joined by Galaxxia, the following people are tasked with carrying out collective programme of this audiovisual series: Juan-Bautista Alcalde Jiménez, Águeda Asenjo Bejarano, Nerea Atance López, Maite Casado Bernal, Amelia Die Goyanes, Pedro Fernández Castañón, Clara Fuentes Cocco, Manuel G., Mikina García de Viedma Irueste, Lucía Gómez Montalvo, Daniela Jándula Herrero, Eduardo L., Mario Manso García, Merche Márquez Urruela, Lúa Peña de la Casa, Nora Ramos Alonso and Lucía del Rey Guzmán.
Galaxxia
is a benchmark project at the intersection between cultural work, youth and territorial diversity. Its practice revolves around the defence of cultural rights and community culture, driving narratives that are “a touch more Frankenstein” — hybrid, experimental and critical —that place under strain contemporary museology, among other spheres. The project is produced by Nada Colectivo and managed by Ana Campillos, Francesca Alessandro and Iris Hernández.


Activity within the program...
The Monstrous Screen
equipoMotor Takes Over the Cinema
And what if a museum were “a touch more Frankenstein”?
equipoMotor brings together teenagers, young and elderly people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects. In this edition, coordinated by the Galaxxia collective, the group is set up as a community of independent programmers that designs and presents four public sessions in the Museo’s Cinema.
The series is arranged into four thematic blocks spread across the year: freakiness as methodology, cultural work, intergenerationality and institutional decentralisation. With the title The Monstrous Screen, this edition champions a dissident, mutant audiovisual space: cinema that has no fear of showing its seams, that lives with its ghosts and turns mixes, errors and drifts into a collective mode of thought. The selected films and videos come from the Hamaca archive, a benchmark platform that assembles the largest experimental audiovisual catalogue in the Spanish State, stretching from the 1960s to the present day.
Ver programa
Freakiness as Methodology
Past activity
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.
This first session explores freakiness as methodology, a way to approach film and museum from experimentation, anomaly and deviation from established canons. Film is understood as a space of essay, where images, sounds and narratives move out of place to open other forms of critical reading, question norms and place the established under strain. This is the framework in which the group agrees to begin from dissent and formulate an initial question: Which monsters already inhabit the institution?
Buenos días España shows how the Brotherhood of Ancient Legionary Knights of Barcelona repeatedly carry out their rituals and military codes of conduct every Sunday, demonstrating how these practices keep far-right ideologies alive. The piece triggers a kind of gaze and tension that interests this group and steers the conversation towards how the abject can inhabit apparent normality.

The Monster of Work
Past activity
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.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
Building on the idea of “the monster of work”, EquipoMotor opens up a dialogue on how the museum might become “a little more Frankenstein” by addressing the material conditions that reproduce, among other things, situations such as those reflected in Get into The Zone, the piece selected by the intergenerational group. The session seeks to continue inhabiting friction, to raise uncomfortable questions and to refine the language with which to imagine futures in which workplace malaise is not silenced but organised.
Get into The Zone is a video essay by Juan David Galindo that explores states of intensive concentration associated with work and leisure in digital environments. The title draws on an expression used in programming to describe a state of productive hyperfocus, linking this condition to contemporary diagnoses and forms of distress such as ADHD, burnout syndrome, anxiety, depression and hyperstimulation.
Galindo’s proposed trajectory combines narrative and conceptual elements. It connects the use of stimulants — from amphetamine-derived pharmaceuticals to coffee, tea, yerba mate and taurine-based drinks — with the economic and cultural history of these substances. It also relates these practices to screen-based work dynamics, video games, electronic music and forms of leisure shaped by continuous stimulation. The author’s personal experience functions here as a guiding thread, situating these processes within a broader social and historical framework.

Intergenerationality
Past activity
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.

The Magic Yes
Past activity
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the idea of the monstrous.
This final session is centred on High Roads (Giuliana Racco, 2022), a film which displaces the gaze, shifting it from the major accounts of genocide in Palestine towards daily forms of resistance. By way of four Palestinian women who play sport, breathe, and practice other bodily disciplines in a context marked by Israeli military occupation, the film shows how care, persistence and community-building can become political practices. High Roads, therefore, connects with the idea of the “magic yes” via the decision to keep on producing well-being, movement and ties in conditions that conspire against it. It also puts forward a form of decentralisation: resistance appears not in institutions or official discourses, but in bodies, affects and shared gestures.
The session unfolds through films that practise ways of deviating from the institutional axis and activate other modes of looking, playing, resisting and organising collectively. Through masks, altered rules, corporeal fictions and daily practices of care, the pieces work with situations where an acceptance of the improbable or the strange is a kind of “magic yes”: a gesture which allows something to be displaced and transformed within a context of hegemony.
The museum thus no longer appears as a fixed place from which to order culture, becoming instead a space traversed by other rules, temporalities and ways of inhabiting the commons. The films assembled in the session displace the gaze towards what normally remains outside: peripheral territories, hybrid practices and clumsy gestures which, however, are full of intent or forms of organisation distanced from dominant codes. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, the rough, the precarious and the strange appear here as legitimate forms of making and showing culture.
The idea is less about affirming a new centrality than opening a question about what happens when central authority is destabilised and other sensibilities, bodies and imaginaries enter the stage. Films that, rather than offering closed responses and looking for consensus, experiment with different ways of inhabiting the museum and producing common space.
Más actividades

Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.

Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.

Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.

Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.

Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.
