Held on 26 Feb 2021
The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites film-maker, poet and writer Margarita Ledo (Castro de Rei, Lugo, 1951) to take part in its programme of master lectures. Exiled in Portugal at the end of Franco’s dictatorship after being persecuted for her affiliation with the Unión do Povo Galego, Margarita Ledo is today a member of the Real Academia Galega and a lecturer in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her filmography is a unique utterance in auteur cinema by virtue of its ongoing shaping of recurrent themes that take root in the search for an ever greater formal complexity. Noteworthy among these themes is the emphasis she places on recovering migrant women’s voices and their accounts marked by diaspora and exile.
This edition of the Chair, comprising a master lecture, sees Margarita Ledo set forth a reflection on the body as a remnant, as a point of arrival after tracing an invisible thread that extends across film based on memory, anti-establishment practices, the marginalisation of women in public spaces, the estrangement of their own bodies and the power of essay films as an artistic practice.
To present and initiate the debate, we recount these words by the film-maker:
“The different writings of ‘I’ with the body as an artefact, as an archive of remnants and interferences, as a subject of desire, as a place to make film, distinguish one from another, for in each of its fragments resides a footprint in which this elemental unease entailing the production of an image and gaze is inscribed. Therefore, somehow or other in each work these ‘knocks behind the door’ reverberate and normally lie dormant in notes, ledgers, and situations we reminisce about and bring into our hands these creators of unreconciled attitude, which, intellectually and personally, passed through the night, exposing, close-up, their existence; they made film an experience for whoever gazes.
To travel through the folds, the line of shadow in which variations of this different gaze are strung together, that female gaze feminist studies pursue and which expands beyond works made by women, that is our commitment with female and male artists that, in terms of thought — from Benjamin to Stuart Hall — are still strong, with those practices that, from the material history of culture, take up a position that chimes with Adrienne Rich and her reflections in her seminal essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ (1985) or with a present generation in which a work with a phenomenological flavour such as Iris Brey’s Le regard féminin (2020) is a joyous symptom that stretches to women artists who reach the world of performance to transit the darkness, anchoring themselves in the canonical incorporation of patriarchal images and the decision to resignify them.
In its double perception — which starts at that moment of grace tying you to a determined sequence of a journey towards the production of that ‘other’ image and continues in that of the person gazing — the body becomes an utterance against fetishization. It is a journey in which a reverberating multiple object formalises in the flow of thought around lived experience, in the ‘dark feelings’ around certain episodes which perhaps must remain in the dark, unrevealed, and which Chantal Akerman offers us in Ma mère rit. Traits et portraits (2013). Although, ad-libbing, sometimes it is important to look for the truth, because when it is there we feel it in books and in films, Akerman tells herself. We feel there is something ‘happening underground, slowly, sometimes very slowly; when you don’t even think about it, the truth appears and comes about at an extraordinary moment that does not come every day; a good moment, so good that suddenly we feel calm and light’.
This dark truth was exile and annihilation, something hard to name. It was the marginalisation of women in public space, the estrangement of their own bodies. It is the century’s inner-history. Yet from darkness the essay film emerges on the screen as a landscape, as an artistic practice, as an encounter between flesh and body. And that latent, dark truth takes on meaning. As in 1928, while Walter Benjamin interviewed André Gide in Berlin. At one point the writer quotes the admiral de Bougainville: ‘When we left the island we gave it the name Salvador Island’. And Benjamin remarks that then, and precisely then, Gide adds that chilling phrase: ‘Ce n’est qu’en quittant une chose que nous la nommons’ (Only when we abandon something do we give it a name). At that moment the narrative begins. Memory is now raw material for a work that perhaps is useful to us to fill the gaps. Fractures in the historical process. Fears”.
Margarita Ledo, February 2021
Margarita Ledo Andión is a film-maker, writer, teacher and researcher. She also lectures in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela and is director of the Audiovisual Studies Group at the same university. Her studies around the politics of representation in photographic and filmic documentary imagery are reflected in works such as
Del Cine Ojo a Dogma 95 (Paidós, 2004) and Cine de fotógrafos (Gustavo Gili, 2005), while her films most notably include the documentary Santa Liberdade (2004), Liste, pronunciado Líster (2007) and A cicatriz branca (2012). In 2008 she received the National Award for Galician Culture in the category of film and audiovisuals and since then has been a numerary member of the Real Academia Galega.
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair
Collaboration
The MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture organized by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), and the Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Fundación Banco Santander
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.