Held on 07, 08, 14 may 2014
Despite being responsible for an extensive filmography that began in the mid 1980s and gained broad recognition and international acclaim, this programme presents one of the few screenings of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi’s film. The double session of Pays Barbare, included within the Intervalos series, is also complemented by a conversation with both film-makers as they cite the main themes that have comprised one of the most committed, rigorous and complex poetics in the recent image in movement.
The work of Gianikian-Ricci Lucchi reviews, analyses and shows tragic episodes – erased in the present – that have determined the history and ideologies of the 20th century; for instance, reordering the world in the colonial documentary (Dal polo all’equator, 1986), or the mutilation of bodies in diaspora in the First World War (Oh! Uomo, 2004), yet always through a meticulous exploration of recovered film archives. These film-makers paralyse the hastened bombardment of images, keeping the historical document in their “analytical camera” – in the words of Yervant Gianikian – a deceleration and manipulation device that, ultimately, searches for the viewer’s ethical glance, which grows inside a spectral and anachronistic image, found between memory and the event, that reoccurs inside the film theatre.
Thus, Pays Barbare narrates from fragments, ruins from the past forgotten in the present – Italy’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia under Mussolini’s dictatorial government. Narrated in chapters, the film uses amateur ethnographic images, recovered from private and anonymous archives, that veer towards another rhythm and chromatic tone. Pays Barbare reflects upon the same cinematic material, its relationship with history and memory, with the body and vision, but also with cinema and destruction. Equally, it shows the construction of the new man of totalitarianism massacring the erotised primitive ‘other’, looking towards the annihilation of the historical document itself, the celluloid both film-makers work on obsessively. Gianikian-Ricci’s latent images not only allude to the large shadow hanging over the 1930s today, but also to the colonial inheritance of the present. In their own words: The barbarian country in question did not remain deeply confined to history, but rather it continues to loom ominously on the current European landscape, going by the names of Ceuta, Melilla and Lampedusa.
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. Pays Barbare
Film, 2013. Screening format: HD. Original Version, Subtitled, 63’. Films d’Ici and Cinenómada.
7 May, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
Second screening: 14 May, 7:00 p.m.
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. In conversation
8 May, 7:00 p.m.
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Friday, 28 November 2025 – 6pm
Curator Patricio Majano invites writer Elena Salamanca, artist Beatriz Cortez and artist and writer Olivier Marboeuf to explore, in conversation, the political agency of artistic forms in relation to the spectral resonances in Central America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.
Central America is a region inhabited by spectres that continually interrupt any attempt at historical closure. Five centuries of colonisation, counterinsurgency wars, genocides, dictatorships and deportations have resulted in accumulated traumas and persistent forms of violence that still move around under the surface of the present. More than past ruins, these spectres are material forces which persist, invade and reclaim the reparation and reconfiguration of the frameworks of historical legibility. In Central American artistic practice, these spectral presences become method, counter-archive and counter-pedagogy.
Taking El Salvador as both axis and prism, this conference seeks to think about “ghostliness”, not as a metaphor but as a political and aesthetic technology, from the following questions: How is that which persists beyond disappearance manifested? Who speaks from amputation? How does memory operate when the State apparatus has systematically searched for its erasure? How is the spectral tapped into as a form of resistance? Which conditions and methods allow art to articulate a claim, reparation and justice when hegemonic narratives are upheld in denial?
Over the course of 2025, these questions have articulated the research residency of Salvadoran curator Patricio Majano in the The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) by virtue of the project Amputated Identities: Ghosts in Salvadoran Art. Majano’s research traces genealogies and resonances between Salvadoran contemporary art, the Indigenous genocide of 1932 and the Civil War (1980–1992), interrogating how these unresolved forms of violence operate with artistic subject matter.
Beyond a closing act of the ICAC residency, this encounter stresses exchange and dialogue as method: opening the process and sharing questions, tensions and unresolved challenges — not as conclusions, but as work in progress.
![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)