Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action

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. 

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 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.

On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.

From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.

With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.

This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.  

Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).  

This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.