Held on 08, 10 nov 2018
Continuing with its presentation of recent films, the Intervals series will screen Risk, a documentary by Laura Poitras (1964) which explores the global surveillance network and the threat it poses to civil liberties in the 21st century. The focal point of the film is Julian Assange (1971), the founder of WikiLeaks and one of the most controversial figures of our times.
Film-maker Laura Poitras sees film as a space from which to dismantle the political-military-industrial complex that shapes American democracy. Her work is built in the present, but the stories she narrates are neither fiction nor representation; they happen while she is shooting her films. One such illustration is Citizenfour (2014), an Oscar-winning documentary which sees CIA agent Edward Snowden first reveal, in front of camera, American intelligence agencies’ global espionage system and illegal wiretapping, which culminated in the so-called US National Security Agency (NSA) scandal. Poitras decided to follow up this film by painting a portrait of the WikiLeaks founder and his organisation and private life. The result is a multifarious film with such a feeling of unease that a protracted legal battle ensued between Poitras and Assange, who tried to censor certain scenes and managed to keep the film out of circulation for a year.
Risk begins in 2011 and stretches across six years, showing at once an admiration for WikiLeaks’ direct journalism and the alternate mass of light and dark in an organisation managed with an internal opaqueness by a power-obsessed leader. Thus Laura Poitras, just like the audience, becomes trapped in this web of contradictions as she plunges into the events in Assange’s life, for instance the arrest warrant in Sweden and the forced asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Laura Poitras is a director and film producer. She directed the 9/11 Trilogy — which explores the illegality of the so-called global war on terror — My Country, My Country (2006), The Oath (2010) and Citizenfour (2014), and was also executive producer of 1971, Evaporating Borders and The Law In These Parts, directed, respectively, by Johanna Hamilton in 2014, Iva Radivojevic, in the same year, and Ra'anan Alexandrovicz in 2011. Her work has been shown at art festivals such as Manifesta 12 (2018) and has been the subject of exhibitions such as Laura Poitras: Astro Noise at New York’s Whitney Museum (2016).
Film data
Length: 92‘
Language: English. Original version with Spanish subtitles
Director: Laura Poitras
Producers: Brenda Coughlin, Yoni Golijov y Laura Poitras
Executive producers: Michael Bloom, Josh Braun, Charlotte Cook, Sam Esmail, Vinnie Malhotra, David Menschel, Adam Pincus, AJ Schnack y Jess Search
Editing: Erin Casper, Melody London y Laura Poitras
Cinematography: Kirsten Johnson, Laura Poitras y Katy Scoggin
Music: Jeremy Flower
Co-production and editing: Jonah Greenstein
![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)
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Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
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In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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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.
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Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.