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24 March, 2014
Luchino Visconti. Rocco and His Brothers
Film, 1960. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 168’
Rosebud Films, Madrid
The Parondi family arrive in Milan. Following the death of the father, they leave their town, Luciana, in southern Italy, so the sons can find work in the big city. The script was first devised as a novel, and after an introduction called The Mother (which wasn’t filmed), the plot is weaved together over five chapters, each one named after one of the five sons (Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, Luca). -
26 March, 2014
Ritwik Ghatak. Subarnarekha
Film, 1962. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 143’
British Film Institute, LondonA native to East Bengal, Ghatak forms part of the millions of refugees that were forced to return to Calcutta when India's Declaration of Independence gave rise to the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. Subarnarekha (1962) is, together with The Hidden Star (1960) and Komal Gandhar (1961), the third part of the so-called Partition Trilogy. Of the three films, Subarnarekha is the most lyrical and the one that most radically condenses the metaphors of Partition: History interrupted, escape and betrayal.
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31 March, 2014
Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Barren Lives
Film, 1963. Projection format: DVD. 103’
Regina Filmes, Rio de JaneiroAs the title itself intimates, the geographical and social conditions determine a way of life and storytelling. A family of farmers are uprooted from their home because of a drought and cross through the country's interior, the sertao (or dry hinterland), on foot. Luckily the rain enables them to stop for a while in a fazenda (farm). The head of the family, Fabiano, is a victim of police persecution and is imprisoned and beaten. He later meets his tormentor, alone, but refuses to seek vengeance. The family set off once again as they search for means of survival.
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2 April, 2014
Djibril Diop Mambéty. Touki Bouki
Film, 1973. Projection format: Digibeta. Original Version, Subtitled. 89’
Copy from the Foundazione Cineteca di Bologna, restored in 2009 by the World Cinema Project in the Cineteca di Bologna/Laboratorio L’Immagine Ritrovata
Rights Maag Daan Crossmedia, Dakar
Touki Bouki prolongs the tension between a pastoral world and the conditions of urban living, yet also marks a turning point. The politicisation of African cinema went hand in hand with national liberation movements, utilizing Marxist critique of the imperialist domination. Mambéty’s inspiration comes not only from the Nouvelle Vague, but also eccentric forms regarding norms of political cinema. Touki Bouki transforms a biographical drama into fable, halfway between lyricism and parody, but does not end with a lesson in morality. -
7 April, 2014
Robert Kramer and John Douglas. Milestones
Film, 1975. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 195’
Copy restored in 2008
Capricci Films, Nantes
Milestones is an immersion in and a stroll around the America of counter cultures in the period that follows the US defeat in Vietnam, with an armistice being signed in 1973. The film is a documentary assemblage blended with sequences of drama, a kaleidoscope of life situations, often accompanied by monologues or long conversations. Within this palimpsest Milestones demonstrates how cinema continues to work on its own emancipation, despite the connection with social struggles being broken. -
9 April, 2014
Chantal Akerman. News from Home
Film, 1976. Projection format: DVD. Original Version, Subtitled. 85’
Paradise Films, Brussels
News from Home describes an autobiographical situation. A young woman living in New York receives news of her family in Brussels. She reads her mother’s letters aloud in a monotonous litany; the voice-over of the reader, at times drowned out by the sounds of traffic, is inserted at regular intervals in a montage of static and long panoramic shots. A distant day-to-day expressed in simple and stereotyped language, with no literary quality, interacts with the contemplative images of Manhattan taken by Babette Mangolte. -
21 April, 2014
Rithy Panh. Site 2
Film, 1989. Projection format: Digibeta. Original Version, Subtitled. 92’
JBA Production, Paris
Yim Om talks about her life from a Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai border; she says: This month, in the cold season, I feel nostalgia for our town, where we lived in freedom. Deep down we only think about this, without knowing who to tell it to. Site 2, Rithy Panh’s first film, shows a broken and disorientated life that is given back some direction by the story and piercing voice narrating it. -
23 April, 2014
Amos Gitai. Wadi 1981-1991
Film, 1991. Projection format: Blu-Ray. Original Version, Subtitled. 97’
Agav Films, Paris
The first Wadi was filmed in 1981 in one of the (wadi) valleys that characterises the site of Haifa, the film-maker’s home city. Wadi Rushmia is an old stone quarry that, despite being abandoned in the 1940s, is still invaded, this time at the beginning of the 1980s by a heterogeneous and marginalised community; the first film describes this living enclave. Gitai returned to these places ten years later. Composed of these two visits, Wadi 1981-1991 joins fragmented life stories that reveal the complex, and often invisible, coexistence between Jewish and Palestinian communities. -
28 April, 2014
Pedro Costa. In Vanda’s Room
Film, 2000. Projection format: Betacam. Original Version, Subtitled. 170’
Courtesy of the director and Optec, Lisbon
The room invaded by the camera is the refuge of a young drug addict called Vanda, inside the family home in a working-class neighbourhood in Lisbon that is being demolished. The young woman’s self-destruction corresponds to the destruction of the area around her, Fontainhas, and was filmed using static shots that appear to withstand the demolition. But these shots are unstable and subjected to the slightest stirrings of the character and the environment. The present resists while on the verge of catastrophe, on the threshold of extinction. -
30 April, 2014
Mati Diop. Mille soleils
Film, 2013. Projection format: Blu-Ray. Original Version, Subtitled. 45’
Cinenomada
The film begins with the image of a herd of horned cows, at a crossroads in Dakar, led by an old man. Mati Diop is the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, who died in 1998. Forty years on from the filming of Touki Bouki, the film-maker meets the two actors and and finds that both have followed their character’s destiny. Mille soleils combines a kind of elegy with elements of social documentary.
Moments in Life. Biography in Film Discourse (1960-2013)
Held on 24, 26, 31 mar, 02, 07, 09, 21, 23, 28, 30 abr 2014
This film program shows the diversity of biographical situations, individual and collective situations addressed in cinema since the early 1960s. The programming, of an historical nature, links the transformation of biographical forms to a history of cinematic memory as the ten films reflect three time periods. The last, Mille soleils (A Thousand Suns, 2013), adds the recollection of a film from the second period – the legendary Touki Bouki (1973) – in a retrospective examination governed by a link to kinship.
The screenings begin with Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, first shown in 1960. At a point that shifts decisively towards the Nouvelle Vague, the Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha displaces the angle of approach: through Rocco, Visconti adds a chapter to the controversial film versus fiction, conferring the dimension of the novel on the world of cinema. Thus, Rocha related the grand form of cinematic drama to the condition of the wretched of the Earth (the eponymous book by Frantz Fanon that appeared in the same year), in other words, to a multitude of lives without biography. Subarnarekha, by Bengali film-maker Ritwik Ghatak, the film Barren Lives, by Brazil’s Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Touki Bouki by Senegalese film-maker Djibril Diop Mambéty, respond and correspond to Rocha’s position, as well as questions raised by Visconti.
A life without properties, in its double meaning without ties or a way out, which cannot be told or transformed in a coherent account, comprises the second period. The collapse of a large collective project brings about a similar effect of loss and expropriation. In 1975 in the United States, Milestones, a film by Robert Kramer and John Douglas, takes stock, in a somewhat disillusioned way, of the militant paths that were formed during the social movement struggles against Vietnam war. The intimate and dedramatised News from Home (1976) complements Milestones, with Chantal Akerman, who had gone to live in New York, giving voice to her mother’s repetitive letters.
Rithy Panh, Amos Gitai and Pedro Costa make up the third historical sequence. The documentary Site 2 dates back to the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A female Cambodian refugee that flees from Pol Pot’s regime of terror tells her story– an example of cinema on the listening. Likewise, violence and exclusion form the backdrop of the two other films. In Wadi, Amos Gitai describes a refuge for lives at the margin, while Costa’s film is portrayed as a documentary, despite the scenes featuring the main character, Vanda, were staged. The room is a place suspended in a void with no future; however, this suspension is also a type of spell that, without diminishing violence, transfigures naturalism.
Curatorship
Jean-François Chevrier
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
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.