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Wednesday, 17 May 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Carlos Saura. Las paredes hablan
Spain, 2022, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 75´
Tickets—With a presentation by the artist Suso33 and Pedro Saura, a lecturer of Photography in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and a researcher specialised in palaeolithic cave art
Historian Alois Riegl once said that there is a will of art with different manifestations across all of humanity’s eras and civilisations. Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk) responds to this idea, a film devoted to the relationship between pre-historic cave art and contemporary urban graffiti — both observe an artistic need above any system, order or rule. Saura’s final film sees him, with unbridled curiosity, walk and guide around the outside and origins of art.
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Saturday, 20 May 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Carlos Saura. Deprisa, deprisa
Spain, 1980, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 99´
Tickets— With a conversation between Elena López Riera, Javier Rebollo (by video), Anna Saura and Sarah Thomas once the screening concludes
“For months I crossed Madrid from one end to the other, and I can say now that I know the city well, particularly its suburbs and streets, cafés, and clubs and, of course, I know many of its inhabitants […]. And so I was surprised by how little I knew of a city where I had spent most of my life, and the changes that had occurred in recent years that had completely altered its structure […]. Perhaps that is why I’m so drawn to the way of living, almost exclusively in the present, of the guys in Deprisa, deprisa. That desire to gulp life down in one go, without thinking about the consequences of their actions, passionately living life, avoiding restraints or ties that suppress individual freedom. Maybe it is a form of protest against a society full of holes and a warning that we are entering a new phase”. Carlos Saura.
In Memory of Carlos Saura. Double Screening
Held on 17, 20 may 2023
In memory of Carlos Saura (1932–2023), this programme screens two films: Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk, 2022), the film-maker’s final work centred on artistic impulses that extend from pre-historic cave painting to contemporary graffiti, and Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry! 1980), one of Saura’s early films and a major landmark in his oeuvre.
To speak of Carlos Saura means to speak of the history of cinema in Spain. His filmography spans seven decades, moving through censorship under the Franco regime, democratic developmentalism and contradictions in the Spanish welfare society. With a unique approach, he managed to move beyond realism to create powerful socio-political allegories and transcend social costumbrismo in dramas chock-full of anti-heroes, emotional contradictions and the will to live. His filmography also engages with other languages like photography, literature, theatre and art, and responds to multiple reflections around the question of what exactly the aesthetic, political and social idiosyncrasies of Spanishness are.
Film-makers Elena López Riera and Javier Rebollo, along with producer Anna Saura and Spanish film scholar Sarah White, see out this programme with a conversation on the director that follows the screening on 20 May.
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Elena López Riera is a film-maker and producer. She is the director of the feature film El agua (Water, 2022), which premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, and the short films Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), first shown at Locarno, and Los que desean (Those Who Desire, 2018), exhibited at MoMA (New York).
Javier Rebollo is a film-maker, screenwriter and producer who holds a degree in Information Science from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has directed the films Lo que sé de Lola (What I Know About Lola, 2006), La mujer sin piano (The Woman without a Piano, 2009), El muerto y ser feliz (The Dead Man and Being Happy, 2012), among others.
Anna Saura is a producer and the daughter of Carlos Saura. She studied Journalism and Advertising, in a joint honours degree, at Francisco de Vitoria University, where she currently lectures. Since 2015, she has managed and developed all of Carlos Saura’s artistic projects.
Sarah Thomas is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University (USA). Her research is focused on contemporary Iberian cultural production, especially film and the representation of subjectivity, gender and childhood. She is the author of the book Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition (University of Toronto Press, 2019).
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Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Participants
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.