Held on 24, 26 nov 2022
This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.
Very little is known about the mysterious figure of Isabel Santaló (born Isabel Martínez Ruiz, Córdoba, 1923–2017), an artist erased from Spanish art history, despite being part of numerous collective exhibitions in Galería Biosca (1962), an abstract art gallery that ran in the 1950s and 1960s, and the subject of glowing essays by distinguished critics such as Vicente Aguilera Cerni and renowned writers like José Manuel Caballero Bonald. The film shows Isabel Santaló as an elderly woman clinging to life in a modest apartment on the outskirts of Madrid, where she receives the occasional visit. Through these visits, and the voice of Antonio López — the only painter of his generation to remember her with astonishing clarity — a multi-faced picture is formed. A unique gaze at an old woman in the humblest moment of her life which, as the film elapses, reveals powerful and lucid visions of art. In short, a film about memory and forgetting, about the creative process and what it means to be a woman and an artist.
Irene M. Borrego (1979) is a film-maker. She studied Film Directing at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) in Cuba, before broadening her studies further at The London Film School. She was later a pupil of film-maker Abbas Kiarostami. As a producer, she has made nine short films to date, with La Visita y Un Jardín secreto her first feature-length film as a director.
Lola Hinojosa (1979) oversees the Museo Reina Sofía’s Performing Arts and Intermedia Collection.
Antonio López (1936) is an artist. His work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, collections, among others. He is also at the centre of the film El sol del membrillo (1992) by film-maker Víctor Erice.
Thursday, 24 November - 7pm
Irene M. Borrego. La Visita y Un Jardín secreto
—Presentation and talk with Irene M. Borrego and Lola Hinojosa
Saturday, 26 November - 7pm
Irene M. Borrego. La Visita y Un Jardín secreto
—Presentation and talk with Irene M. Borrego and Lola Hinojosa
Credits
La Visita y Un Jardín secreto
Spain and Portugal, 2022, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 65'
Director:Irene M. BorregoProduction:Mariangela Mondolo-Burghard and Renata SanchoScript:Irene M. Borrego and Manuel Muñoz RivasCinematography:Rita Noriega and Javier CalvoSound:Nicolas Tsabertidis and Hugo LeitãoEditing:Manuel Muñoz Rivas and Irene M. BorregoAudio post-production:Hugo LeitãoMusic:Frederic Mompou, performed by Alexis Delgado BúrdaloAssistant director:Adriana F. CastellanosAwards:
25th Málaga Film Festival, 2022. Biznaga de Plata Award for Best Director and the Biznaga de Plata Audience Award
Documenta Madrid, 2022. 19th International Film Festival. Audience Award
Cineteca Madrid, Best National Film
IBAFF International Film Festival of Murcia, 2022. 12th edition. Best Feature Film Award
20th Doclisboa, 2022. HBO Award for Portuguese Competition Best Film, and the ETIC Award for Best Portuguese Competition Film – Escolas Award
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
illycaffè
Inside the framework of
Programme
Participants
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)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.