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Wednesday, 26 May 2021 – 7:30pm Cineteca Madrid (Matadero), Sala Azcona
Opening
Luke Fowler
Patrick
UK, 2020, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 21’―With a video presentation by Luke Fowler and in-person presentation by Chema González, James Lattimer and Gonzalo de Pedro
―Lecture-performance by Jorge Socarras
The short film Patrick, the artist’s most recent work and screened in Spain for the first time, shows fragments of the life, not the biography, of electronic music composer Patrick Cowley (1950–1982), a pioneer in the use of the synthesiser in disco, the producer behind anthems such as Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) [1978] and the remix of I Feel Love by Donna Summer (1978), and a composer of peerless high-spirited and vibrant tracks that defined that era of unparalleled freedom before the AIDS epidemic hit America’s West Coast. The screening is accompanied by an exclusive lecture-performance: Jorge Socarras, another San Francisco disco legend and friend and collaborator of Cowley’s, will play some musical highlights from the era and talk about Cowley’s legacy, accompanied by new 16mm images by Fowler.
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Friday, 28 May 2021 – 6pm Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Programme 1. Making Music
Second session: Sunday, 6 June 2021 – 12pm
TicketsLuke Fowler
Electro-Pythagoras: a Portrait of Martin Bartlett
UK, Canada, 2017, colour and b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 45’For Christian
UK, USA, 2016, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 6’45’’Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins)
UK, 2017, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 18’29’’Patrick
UK, 2020, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 21’―With a video presentation by Luke Fowler and in-person presentation by James Lattimer in the first session
Music making forms an inescapable element of Fowler’s oeuvre, whether as a specific process, a life enterprise, the expression of a countercultural position or some combination of the three. Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) is a suitably loose-limbed biography of gay Canadian composer and electronic music pioneer Martin Bartlett (1939-93), gliding freely between text, photo and video, salient figures, devices and locations and the personal and the professional, with retro computer graphics, an insightful voiceover and Bartlett’s own music on hand to tie the many moving parts together. For Christian has composer Christian Wolff discuss his compositional strategies in voiceover to free-flowing images of his Vermont farm, while Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins) interweaves the recording process for the artist’s titular piece shot from countless different angles with sounds and images from Fowler’s own daily life: filmmaker and subject as one. Patrick, screening as a Spanish premiere, marks a return to the biographical, a sunny jaunt through San Francisco and the surrounding landscape in search of the traces left behind by trailblazing disco producer Patrick Cowley, who died of AIDS in 1992, as Fowler encases his pulsating flow of luminous images in Cowley’s sparkling sounds.
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Saturday, 29 May 2021 – 6:30pm Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Programme 2. Listening
Second session: Monday, 7 June 2021 – 6pm
TicketsLuke Fowler
A Grammar For Listening – Part 1
UK, 2009, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 22’A Grammar For Listening – Part 2
UK, 2009, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 21’A Grammar For Listening – Part 3
UK, 2009, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 13’Depositions
UK, 2014, colour and b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 24’32’’―With a video presentation by Luke Fowler and in-person presentation by James Lattimer in the first session
What does it mean to listen? Although many of Fowler’s films pose this question, the A Grammar for Listening cycle places it front and centre. These three collaborations with sound artists—Lee Paterson, Eric La Casa and Toshiya Tsunoda respectively– comprise beautifully enveloping sound and image recordings at various locations, including London landmarks, rural and industrial settings in Scotland and other nondescript markets and parks. Part one labels its different locations and the sounds being recorded there, just as part two withholds the same information, while part 3 puts the act of recording on direct display. Do we read sound via image or is it other way around? And if context shapes perception, when does that become a grammar? Depositions takes the idea of listening in a different direction, compiling a jittery blend of archival footage culled from ‘70s and ‘80s BBC documentaries that illustrates how the communities of the Scottish Highlands were constantly asked to justify their existence, even as their answers were never truly heard. Yet there was so much more to be listened to beyond these banal depositions: the sound of a landscape, of bone cracking in a crucible, of wind and water, of song.
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Sunday, 30 May 2021 – 12pm Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Programme 3. People, Spaces, Traces
Second session: Sunday, 13 June 2021 – 12pm
TicketsLuke Fowler
George
UK, 2008, colour, sound, without dialogue, DA, 5’Cézanne
UK, 2019, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 6’36’’Houses (for Margaret)
UK, 2019, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 4’57’’Mum’s Cards
UK, 2018, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 9’3’’To The Editor of Amateur Photographer (co-directed with Mark Fell)
UK, 2014, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 68’45’’―Presented by James Lattimer in the first session
Fowler’s portraiture frequently proceeds by exploring the spaces pivotal to his subjects and the traces and associations they contain. George draws on splitscreen and a piano refrain to take the pulse of the St. George’s Cross area of Glasgow, where Fowler himself grew up. Cezánne approaches the Post-Impressionist master by jumping back and forth between his studio, garden and the mountain that inspired some of his most famous works, while Houses (for Margaret) erects a gentle monument to Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait by way of her Orkney cottage, the writings it houses and her poem on the concept of home. The collected notes of Fowler’s sociologist mother give structure to Mum’s Cards, the study of a lifetime of theoretical engagement via a desk and all that was written there. To the Editor of Amateur Photographer is a feature-length examination of the history of Pavilion, Europe’s first feminist photography centre that was established in Leeds in 1982. Interviews with the centre’s key players, countless photos taken there and all the accompanying paperwork, harsh electronic crunches and reflections on what it means to make a film about feminism as a man coalesce into a singular portrait of a singular endeavour.
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Monday, 31 May 2021 – 6pm Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Programme 4. All Divided Selves
Second session: Monday, 21 June 2021 – 6pm
TicketsLuke Fowler
Helen
UK, 2009, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 3’David
UK, 2009, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 3’Lester
UK, 2009, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 3’Anna
UK, 2009, colour, sound, without dialogue, 16mm, 3’All Divided Selves
UK, 2011, colour and b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 93’―Presented by James Lattimer in the first session
The opening quartet of three-minute shorts are flickering portraits of the titular people who each live in the same Victorian tenement in Glasgow, none of whom are ever seen. Their lives are conjured up instead by shifts in light, views out of the window, textures, shapes and patterns and any number of books: four distinct individuals shaped by the same divided up space. All Divided Selves, which landed Fowler a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize, is a frenetic, collage-like biography of famed Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Fowler draws on Laing’s countless appearances on UK television and radio to this end, combining this ample archive material such that chronology is irrelevant and repetition more than permitted. The idea is convey the protean Laing’s position within society: a foreign body jutting out of an establishment just waiting to chew him up and a node through which all the primary movements of the period flowed. Fowler’s own 16mm footage is spliced into these past images with spasmodic glee, taking up their motifs at times but also diverging from them at will, thus producing the sort of stream of pure sensory experience that Laing himself sought to grasp: form and content ravishingly intertwined.
Held on 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 May, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Jun 2021
The second session of the Programme 4. All Divided Selves is postponed to Monday 21, June
Luke Fowler has unfortunately had to cancel his trip to Madrid due to last-minute health issues. Therefore, the in-person introductions will be replaced by video introductions.
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council, present a retrospective on Luke Fowler (Glasgow, 1978), a celebrated British artist, film-maker and musician. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, Fowler explores the relationship between subject and archive, memory and history through the possibilities afforded by experimental cinema.
Encompassing short-, medium- and feature-length work that explores the border region between documentary and experimental film, Fowler’s cinema oeuvre is best described as a form of deeply unconventional portraiture. The experiences of his equally unorthodox subjects are tapped into via carefully compiled audiovisual snippets of their lives, endeavours and surroundings, which Fowler edits together on shimmering 16mm with a sense of openness and rhythm second to none.
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Cultural outsiders or figures seldom given the spotlight are Fowler’s favoured choice of subject, whether filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (Houses (For Margaret), a female photography collective from Leeds (To The Editor Of Amateur Photographer), unorthodox psychiatrist R.D. Laing (All Divided Selves), the remote communities of the Scottish Highlands (Depositions), the unseen residents of a Glasgow tenement (Anna, Helen, David and Lester) or even his own mother (Mum’s Cards). His compassionate portraits aim more at generating sensation or mood than completeness or linearity, taking their bearings from the spaces these diverse individuals spent their lives in and the materials they collected (or have had collected on them) over time. If every person leaves traces, whether textual, pictorial or audiovisual, Fowler is their thoughtful, tender archivist, bringing them into gentle, never constrictive alignment so that their multiple subjectivities, materialities, temporalities, ambiguities and underlying ideologies are on clear display; his use of 16mm, itself a process of capturing traces, makes perfect sense to this end.
Given Fowler’s own successful musical career, it’s unsurprising that music and sound form another integral part of his filmmaking, which is always as much an exercise in listening as it is in seeing. Musicians, often outsider figures too, are frequently at the heart of his films as such, including gay electronic music pioneer Martin Bartlett (Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett)), New England based composer and lecturer Christian Wolff (For Christian) and British sound artist Sue Tompkins (Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins)). In addition, the enveloping soundscapes and musical accompaniments that form an integral part of Fowler’s work are often forged via direct collaborations with sound artists, composers and recordists, such as Lee Patterson (A Grammar For Listening – Part 1), Eric La Casa (A Grammar For Listening – Part 2) or Toshiya Tsunoda (A Grammar For Listening – Part 3, Cezanne).
The starting point for the retrospective is the Spanish premiere of Fowler’s most recent short film Patrick, which encapsulates many of the formal approaches and thematic concerns that run through his oeuvre. This 21-minute portrait of gay San Francisco disco artist Patrick Cowley, a further pioneer of electronic music who died of AIDS in 1982, explores his legacy in typically shifting fashion, interrupting interviews with his contemporaries and shots of promotional materials and correspondence with luminous, impressionistic fragments of the California landscape and cityscapes that he called home, all tied together by Cowley’s own propulsive sounds.
As sound and image are inextricably intertwined in Fowler’s films, perhaps their most defining formal characteristic is their rhythm, which emerges from the soundtrack but is not restricted to it, as Fowler’s singular grasp of editing creates patterns and pulsations all of its own, a twitchy, hypnotic, intensely corporeal feeling that dovetails with his restless curiosity for those he crafts portraits of. Perhaps one of the opening lines from Electro-Pythagoras (a Portrait of Martin Bartlett) thus offers the best way to describe these unique, delicate combinations of sound and motion, histories and subjects, as the way in which their idiosyncratic approach is brought to bear on the idiosyncrasies of their subjects feels like a whole ethos in terms of form and content alike: “a certain predilection for things out of the ordinary”.
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Comisariado
James Lattimer
Organizan
Museo Reina Sofía y Documenta Madrid (18º Festival Internacional de Cine)
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.