Held on 16 dic 2021
Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.
A sharp observation by Jean-Luc Godard on Israeli and Palestinian film is also applicable to our European vision of socially committed Arab cinema: the resource of fable and fiction is the “property” of Israeli film-makers, whereas there is insistence upon Palestinians for the factual immediacy of the documentary image; put another way, reality in its most precarious and miserable state. Mapping Lessons monumentally breaks this division and is striking as a sophisticated and intelligent film about social utopia in the contemporary Arab world, whereby a montage of historical archives is mixed with an experimental exercise in narrative fiction. Thus, it forms a constellation of radical movements, from the Soviets of the Russian Revolution to present-day communes in Syria, assembled through travel diaries and memories of Arab subjects who have lived through these times of change and expectation.
In the words of Philip Rizk: “After the crushing of our revolution in Egypt in 2013, Mapping Lessons began as a daydream. The film is a visual conversation between political struggles across time and space, from anti-colonial battles against the French and British in the 1920s, to the Syrian Revolution in 2011, 1936 Spain, a revisionist memory of Russian Soviets and the Paris Commune, among others. Mapping Lessons was my way of relating our neo-colonial relationship with the past, all with an eye on what to do the next time”.
Philip Rizk (Limassol, Cyprus, 1982) is a film-maker and activist. He is a member of Mosireen, a collective that broadcast and composed a real-time archive of the 2011 Egyptian revolution (858: An Archive of Resistance). After studying philosophy and anthropology, he has worked in the field of video since 2008. His productions have been screened at international festivals such as Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. In 2015, he participated in the German pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia with Out on the Street, a film made with Jasmina Metwaly the same year. His essay on images and the Egyptian Revolution “2011 is not 1968: An Open Letter to an Onlooker” was published in the anthology Uncommon Grounds. New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (compiled by Antony Downey, I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Javier H. Estrada is a critic, lecturer and cinema programmer. He holds an MA in the History of Film and Visual Media from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is head of programming at the Seville Film Festival and the FILMADRID International Film Festival. He is also a member of the editorial board for the magazines Caimán. Cuadernos de cine and Secuencias. Revista de historia del cine.
Programme
Thursday, 16 December – 6pm
Philip Rizk. Mapping Lessons
—Presentation and talk by Philip Rizk
Saturday, 18 November – 6pm
Philip Rizk. Mapping Lessons
—Presentation and talk by Philip Rizk and Javier H. Estrada
Credits
Mapping Lessons
Egypt, 2020, colour and b/w, original version in Arabic, French, German, English and Ukrainian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 61’
Director, editor and producer:Philip Rizk Editing advisor:Mohamed Hassan ShawkyDesign, supervision and sound editing:Max SchneiderSound editing:Nadah El ShazlyTranslations:Farah Barqawi, Katharine Halls y Ma Hoogla-Kalfat (MaYo)With interventions by:Farah Barqawi, Walid, Aylin Çankaya, Saeed al-Wakeel, Matthieu Rey, Ahmed, Z, M. and Osama al-HosseinWith the support of:Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FFAI) and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin ProgramProduced in:AFAC Unspoken Series at Volksbühne Roter Salon
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Participants
![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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Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
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.
UP/ROOTING
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.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
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.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.