Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum
Held on 04 Oct 2010
The videos included in the first programme, Food Pavilion (2002) and Se confiesan (2008), draw on a piece that the artist showed at the Expo 2000 Theme Park in Hanover and his collaboration with the Power Food project to explore a topic that fascinates Miralda, the relationship between visual culture and food in modern society. The result is a reflection on excess, deficiency, consumerism and faith. The second programme includes three pieces that document works done by Miralda between 1977 and 2010. Breadline (1977-2009), a reference to the lines of people waiting for bread to be distributed during recession times, is a video document of an exhibition held in Houston in 1977 and the performance piece presented during the inauguration. The opening routine of the piece - which concluded with the formation of a breadline - was done by the Kilgore College Rangerettes, founded in 1939. Taste Point Charlie (1979-2010) is a ‘visual chronicle’ about East and West Berlin and the wall that separated them, filmed in 8 mm during Miralda’s visit to that emblematic German city. This programme concludes with Wheat & Steak (1981-2008), a video of an urban project done in Kansas City in 1981 that linked the harvest (wheat) to livestock (meat). It was made up of three parts: a parade through the centre of the city, an exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Gold Taste ceremony at the commodities exchange, which consisted of exchanging money for grains of wheat and the wheat for slices of blue bread spread with pork fat and covered with a sheet of gold.
Finally, two of the first films that Miralda made in collaboration with Benet Rosell (Lérida, 1937) are being screened. The delirious Boum! Boum! En avant la musique! (1974) includes Miralda himself acting alongside the artist Jaume Xifra (Girona, 1934) and art critic Pierre Restany. La cumparsita (1972) documents Miralda’s performance piece in the streets of Paris, where he walked around with a life-size plastic soldier on his back.
The programme for this cycle includes a conference with Antoni Mercader, a professor at the Department of Visual and Plastic Education at the University of Barcelona and the participation of Benet Rosell.
Más actividades
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
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.