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Session 1. The Dialectical Image: Hollis Frampton
Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments (Panopticons), 1974. 16 mm film, 52’.
Apparatus Sum (Studies For Magellan #1), 1972. 16 mm film, 3’.
Winter Solstice (Solariumagelani), 1974. 16 mm film, 33’.
Otherwise Unexplained Fires (Memoranda Magelani), 1976. 16 mm film, 14’.
For Georgia O'Keefe (Pares Magelani), 1976. 16 mm film, 3’.
Not The First Time (Tempera Magelani), 1976. 16 mm film, 5’.
Tiger Balm (Memoranda Magelani #1), 1972. 16 mm film, 10’.
Gloria!, 1979. 16 mm film, 9’. -
Session 2. Moi est un autre. Bruce Baillie, Sharon Lockhardt, Robert Beavers and Jean Rouch
Bruce Baillie. Quixote, 1965. 16 mm film, 45’.
Sharon Lockhart. NÔ, 2003. 16 mm film, 34’.
Robert Beavers. Early Monthly Segments, 1968-70/2002. 35 mm film, 33’.
Jean Rouch. Les Maîtres fous, 1955. 16 mm film, 36’. -
Session 3: Pa(i)sajes [Landscapes/Passages]. Peter Nestler, Jem Cohen and James Benning
Peter Nestler. Die Nordkalotte, 1991. 16 mm film, 90’.
Jem Cohen. The Passage Clock (For Walter Benjamin), 2008. Video transferred to DVD, 10’.
James Benning. One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later, 2005. 16 mm film, 121’. -
Session 4 - Representatio of History, History of Representation. David Gatten, Robert Fenz and Guy Sherwin
David Gatten. Secret History of the Dividing Line, 1996-2002. 16 mm film, 20’.
David Gatten. The Great Art of Knowing, 2004. 16 mm film, 37’.
David Gatten. So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come, 2010. 16 mm film, 9’.
Robert Fenz. Crossings, 2006. 16 mm film, 5’.
Robert Fenz. Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City, 2003. 16 mm film, 32’.
Guy Sherwin. Portrait with Parents / Candle and Clock / Tap / Breathing / Metronome / Maya, 1976. 16 mm film, 20’. -
Session 5. War and Insanity. Sergei Loznitsa, Carolee Schneemann and John Gianvito
Sergei Loznitsa. Blokada, 2006. 35 mm film, 51’.
Carolee Schneemann. Viet Flakes, 1965. Video, 7’.
John Gianvito. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, 2008. Video, 58’. -
Session 6. The Future is Already Over. Gregory J. Markopoulos and Marguerite Duras
Gregory J. Markopoulos. Twice a Man, 1963. 16 mm film, 49’.
Marguerite Duras. Agatha et les lectures illimitées, 1981. 35 mm film, 90’.
Reading Images, Reading Time
Held on 06 Jun 2011
With this purpose in mind, a program has been designed that functions as a complex system comprised of different, even opposing, points of views and forms. The idea is to uncover a set of contradictions, in an attempt to show the precariousness of the meaning of history, to show the passage of time beyond all logical or causal effects. In other words, following the same lines as the proposition made by Georges Didi-Huberman in his Atlas. How to carry the world on one's back?, the idea is to present, by means of a montage project, the rips and reverberations found inside forms, in this case forms in movement, which are also the mediated representation of History.
Reading images, reading time arranges a series of heterogeneous and anachronistic materials that cover the period from the 1950s to the present and that, when the spectator takes position, build a sort of constellation capable of containing, by friction, a compendium of time fragments and fundamental images with which to understand the presence of a past, now remote, in a present built by the powerful with bricks of sensationalism, through the influence of fashion. The exhibition articulates a total of six groups by theme and rhythm, each holding materials and points of view that are fragmentary, but equally true: works that engage in dialogue with one another, seeking a new way to think between the images, led by resonance, alteration and juxtaposition.
Reading images, reading time attempts to produce that distance that is so important in manipulating sets of audiovisual pieces. Thus, the power of the moving image ends up becoming that which entraps it in a play of similarities and multiplicities, from its origin in the eternal metamorphosis of forms. That which is true over time can only be reflected in transitory and materialistic images, footprints in flight: a stocking turned inside out.
Curatorship
Francisco Algarín, Alfredo Aracil y Abraham Rivera
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.