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Programme 1
Museum
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Wednesday, 22 January 2020 – 7pm
Session 1
Second session: Sunday, 26 January – 6pm
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville
The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century
France and USA, 1999, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 49´This film was made for MoMA and serves as a moving compendium of Godard’s and Miéville’s aesthetic thought. Posing the question of whether art is “legend” or “reality”, i.e. myth or history, images of artworks from diverse eras and disciplines materialise. All of them are contained in this “old place”, the museum, a space of memory and reflection in times of amnesia and absolute market demand. Art, Godard tells us, is one more object from this past time but, between distance and proximity (“legend” or “reality”), it still entertains hope of changing the present: it is the invention of a fragment of another possible world. Authors also write 23 theories of unique beauty and mystery that claim, at the end of the 20th century, the right to exist from art.
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Friday, 24 January 2020 – 7pm
Session 2
Second session: Monday, 27 January – 7pm
Anne-Marie Miéville
Souvenir d´utopie
France and Switzerland, 2006, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 6’Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville
Reportage amateur (maquette expo)
France and Switzerland, 2006, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 47´At the turn of the 21st century, the Centre Pompidou undertook a project to mount an exhibition curated by one of the previous century’s great film-makers, with the initial title Collage(s) de France, archéologie du cinéma d’après JLG. Godard would not only pull out of the project, he also declared that the final exhibition, entitled Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006. À la recherche d’un théorème perdu (Centre Pompidou, 2006), did not represent his thinking. He also remarked that the only trace of the original show was the maquettes, which Godard made by hand and which he used to mount its curatorial discourse. The two films in this session film these maquettes, a personal imaginary museum in which Godard puts forward the most radical installation of the exhibition space. Souvenir d´utopie is a silent walk around the exhibition, with Miéville’s camera simulating the visitor’s gaze. Reportage amateur (maquette expo) sees Godard narrate the theoretical diagram of Collage(s) of France, according to the arrangement of rooms initially conceived in his project: Myth, Humanity, Camera, Film(s), The Subconscious, The Bastards, Reality, Death, The Grave. An inimitable challenge to the conditions in the museum.
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Programme 2
Language and Catastrophe
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Saturday, 25 January 2020 – 7pm
Session 1
Second session: Saturday, 8 February – 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard
Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language)
France, 2014, colour, original version in French, English and German with Spanish subtitles, B-R, 67´Godard’s second film in a new digital medium and 3D technology. We imagine the film-maker drawing a line under analogue film, after Histoire(s) de cinema, and trying out a new way of writing with the digital image. Goodbye to Language assumes an elegiac tone of abandonment on numerous levels: in the film medium, in the stories of lovelessness between the film’s two couples, two nostalgic and youthful remakes by Godard, and in the role of the word (language) to define the world. It is also the pure and innocent birth of a new experience, when words are left behind. How does the world speak to us when the simple and conventional code that reduces it disappears? The prominence of the dog Roxy (“the only being that will love you more than you love yourself”, a Charles Darwin quote Godard utters) and the exuberance of nature speaks of a fledgling sensibility when words become surplus.
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Wednesday, 29 January 2020 – 7pm
Session 2
Second session: Sunday, 9 February – 6pm
Jean-Luc Godard
Film socialisme
Switzerland, 2010, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 97´Godard’s first feature film that is shot completely in video and fully utilises the juxtapositions, contrasts and saturation of the digital image, symptomatic of a time which is unhinged and rushed. The film-maker offers a film in three movements, in the form of a sonata: the first is quick, realised on a Mediterranean cruise with different stops; the second is slow and involves a family, a house and a petrol station in Southern France; the third, faster and shorter than the first, is a journey around some of the renowned enclaves on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
In the first movement, Such Things, Godard, Alain Badiou and Patti Smith share space with a motley crew of tourists who record images without looking at them — a cruise as an eroded version of the Grand Tour of the Enlightenment. In the second, Our Europe, a family is visited by two cameras while children debate liberty, equality and fraternity in a time of perpetual surveillance. The third, Our Humanities, focuses on the phrase: “the nation is not a country; it is a territory in conflict”. The approach of Film Socialisme is clear: to maintain a model of civilization alive in its fragments or delighting in the scene of its disintegration.
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Thursday, 30 January 2020 – 7pm
Session 3
Second session: Monday, 10 February – 7pm
Paul Grivas
Film catastrophe
France, 2018, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 55’First session presented by Paul Grivas.
Paul Grivas is one of four cinematographers, with François Aragno, Jean-Paul Battagia and Godard, in Film Socialisme, forming part of the group of young collaborators working closely with the director in recent years. The role of prophet has followed Jean-Luc Godard throughout his career: widely known are his prophecies from May ‘68, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Palestinian Intifada. This is also the case with Film Socialisme, a film which astonishingly foresees the spectre of the European crisis, with the first part filmed on an ocean liner on the Mediterranean, denoting the moral debacle of old continental culture. Few could envisage this metaphor becoming international news: this liner is the Costa Concordia, the boat which capsized and sank in 2012 on the Italian coast, causing 32 deaths. In Film Catastrophe Paul Grivas captures the setting around the shooting of Film Socialisme: living alongside tourists, concerts, buffets, outdoor activities, and so on. Rituals which are inseparable from another on-board feast: tourists devouring images with their mobile phones.
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Saturday, 1 February 2020 – 7pm
Session 4
Second session: Saturday, 15 February – 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard
Le Livre d´image (The Image Book)
Switzerland, 2018, b/w and colour, original version in French, English, Arabic, Italian and German with Spanish subtitles, DA, 84´“The Image Book is cinema, and cinema is the lay culture that helps us against all books of the law, the Koran, the Bible, the Torah… It is the modernity of light against the darkness conveyed by those books of monotheistic religions. The image is what protects us against laws, dictatorships, rules. The image is the territory of freedom, fraternity… The principles of the republic of images. Each image is important, from those in my mobile phone to those from a sublime Hitchcock film in Hollywood. Each image is a citizenry in the republic of images, and a political model. Films are political models of co-existence, mutual solidarity, dialogue, against all rules that come from books, text, logos. All bibles are prescriptions (…). Images free us from those beliefs and prohibitions, and the way in which Jean-Luc (Godard) edits them, organises them, saves them, adds them and also disconnects them is an organisational model on how to be free,” writes Nicole Brenez, a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, and a film programmer, theorist and writer.
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Programme 3
History
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Monday, 3 February 2020 – 7pm
Session 1
Second session: Wednesday, 12 February – 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville
De l’origine du XXIe siècle
France, 2000, b/w and colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 16’Moments choisis des histoire[s] du cinéma
France, 2004, b/w and colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 35mm, 84’This film shows the film-maker performing the role of a historian contemplating brutality and attempting to unravel its causes and motives through images, new words he writes with to produce history. De l’origine du XXIe siècle is a stream of violence, ecstasy and emotion before the legacy of the 20th century, a tumultuous and savage period. Documentary images live beside fictitious, pornographic and sacrificial ones — all, ultimately, images of history. “In search of a lost century”, recites one of the subtitles, the main characteristic of which Godard sets in the thought of Georges Bataille: the struggle between State control and the freedom of love. Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinema, meanwhile, is a coda to the great Histoire(s) de cinéma (1988-1998). An epilogue contained in the phrase of film-maker and theorist Hollis Frampton: “No activity can become an art before its epoch has ended”. What remains of cinema after the 20th century?
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Wednesday, 5 February 2020 – 7pm
Session 2
Second session: Friday, 14 February – 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard
Vrai faux passeport. Fiction documentaire sur des occasions de porter un jugement à propos de la façon de faire des films
France, 2006, b/w and colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 56’A summary trial in which Godard expounds and dismantles film-making methods of other directors and references the possible link to a true discourse or, conversely, one which is manipulated, or profoundly false. A quote from Saint Augustine opens the film like a declaration of intent: “The truth is so cherished that even the liars wish that what they say is true”. The Latin terms bonus and malus are used by the judge/film-maker as moral categories (passports) assigned without consideration. In the dock sit Quentin Tarantino, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Vigo, Chantal Akerman, Martin Scorsese and Vincent Gallo, and many others. In contrast to the analytical and totalizing reflection of Histoire(s) de cinema, Vrai faux passeport is a critique in the strictest tradition of Charles Baudelaire: passionate, subjective, uncontrollable.
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Programme 4
Apparitions
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Friday, 7 February 2020 – 7pm
Sesion 1
Second session: Sunday, 16 February – 6pm
Jean-Luc Godard
JLG/JLG – autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December)
France, 1995, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, AD, 60´Une catastrophe
Switzerland, 2008, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 1’Khan Khanne, seléction naturelle
France, 2014, b/w and colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 9’Remerciements de Jean-Luc Godard à son Prix d´honneur du cinéma suisse
Switzerland, 2015, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 5’Bande-annonce de la 22ème édition du festival international du film documentaire de Jihlava
Switzerland and the Czech Republic, 2018, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 1’Sought by the whole film system, considered to be one of the great artists in our life and times, and rejuvenated in the exploration of digital language, Godard has become a ubiquitous presence in the programmes and homages of renowned festivals. Yet the film-maker responds by acts of disappearance and noticeable absence to become a spectre, a ghost, one more image. This session is a two-part self-portrait: in JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December we see his spartan lifestyle in the Swiss town of Rolle, his refuge and centre of operations. In the other short pieces, the film-maker examines his own disappearance and theorises about his marginalised and classless role. A poet who speaks about the world from outside the world: “So I’m going home/with The Ashes of Gramsci/a poem by Pasolini/it speaks of humble corruption,” Jean-Luc Godard remarks in Remerciements de Jean-Luc Godard à son Prix d´honneur du cinéma suisse.
Held on 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30 Jan, 01, 03, 05, 07, 08, 09, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16 Feb 2020
The Museo Reina Sofía presents a retrospective on one of the vital artists and thinkers of our time: film-maker Jean-Luc Godard (1930). The series spotlights his twenty-first-century productions and his ventures into the potential of the digital image, where film is rewritten as a present-day art.
At 89, Jean-Luc Godard sits among the most avant-garde film-makers and, rather than lingering on past roles — writer, activist, poet — he has reinvented himself as a thinker through images. In his later years, Godard has made Goya’s famous maxim his own: I’m still learning; new knowledge related to the limitless exploration of the digital image, understood not from the fetishism of a new technique, but as the possibility of engendering a new discourse, a new useful language for another experience. This period also stresses the importance of a group of his collaborators: cinematographers Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battaglia, film historian Nicole Brenez, and photographer and film-maker Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard’s companion in his exile in Rolle, Switzerland.
The series begins after Histoire(s) de cinema (1988-1998), a gargantuan project that would take him a decade and in which he would officiate the history of the 20th century through successive multiplications of film histories, stretching to his recent participation in international festivals with brief pieces, the letters by an artist celebrating his concurrent disappearance and omnipresence.
In the series, four programmes form thematic strands. Firstly, Museum: two sessions focusing on how the film-maker questions the institution, “the old place”. On one side, filming, in essay form, for MoMA, ranging over memory, time and the role of art (The Old Place, with Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999), and, on the other, exploring the installation of an exhibition at the Pompidou, in itself a history of civilization (Souvenir d´utopie, Anne-Marie Miéville, 2006, and Reportage amateur (maquette expo), with Anne-Marie Miéville, 2006).
The second programme, entitled Language and Catastrophe, encompasses the trilogy Goodbye to Language, Film Socialisme and The Image Book, three feature-length films in which a new digital vocabulary sets the scene to speak of contemporary catastrophe and hope for the future. Interspersed with this trilogy is the screening of Film Catastrophe. The third programme, History, includes the epilogue to Histoire(s) de cinema, Godard’s version of the 20th century as a legacy of brutality and, finally, a devastating critique of other film-makers through the ethics of images. To conclude, the programme Apparitions presents the director’s film portraits — in JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December we get a look into his austerity and isolation in Rolle; in the rest, brief letters Godard sent to festivals where he questions himself, invoking absurdity and existential solitude (Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett) while examining the rituals of cinema.
Acknowledgements
Fabrice Aragno, CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris) and MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Force line
Rethinking the Museum and Avant-gardes
Curatorship
Chema González
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Más actividades
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the Mapfre Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo
Tuesday, 10 February 2026 – 7pm
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo, Fernando Davis, the show’s curator, and Amanda de la Garza, the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artist director, will converse in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400 on the life and work of the Argentinian artist, a core figure in experimental avant-garde art.
The title of both exhibition and conversation originates from the proclamation “Long Live Arte Vivo” Alberto Greco (Buenos Aires, 1931— Barcelona, 1965) disseminated around the streets and on the walls of Rome. For Greco, arte vivo was an art of the future, an art based on a set of irreverent and untimely gestures, of adventures open to unpredictability melding with life, and which began in 1962, prior to his coining of the term “vivo-dito”. In his Manifiesto dito dell´arte vivo (Dito Arte-Vivo Manifesto), which he pasted on the walls of Genoa, Greco encouraged new contact “with the living elements of our reality: movement, time, people, conversations, smells, rumours, places, situations”. He would also burst into the everyday of Madrid’s streets as he convened a “vivo-dito moment”, culminating in the burning of a canvas painted collectively in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.
In addition to founding arte vivo, Alberto Greco was an informalist painter, a queer flâneur, a poet and sometime actor. This intense journey of Greco’s life and art is closely connected to the migrant route he embarked upon in 1950 in Buenos Aires, taking in Atacama and Humahuaca, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Genoa, Rome, Madrid, Piedralaves, New York and Ibiza and ending abruptly in Barcelona, where he took his own life shortly after writing his final great work, the novel Besos brujos (Bewitching Kisses, 1965).
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
“This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call ‛aestheticide’ — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?”
—T.J. DemosThis seminar takes place thanks to the art historian’s invitation to Spain by the Miró Foundation. In the context of the museum, it engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.