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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)
![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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
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.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
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.