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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 Apr 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
Más actividades
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.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
Dear Felix:
Saturdays at 6pm
The immediately recognisable art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which is on display, from May to October 2026, in the show Sweet Revenge, moves beyond the transmission of messages laden with poetic evocation, vital or biographical reflection, or even a clear political or ethical positioning. Rather, it seeks an active response by visitors to the exhibition. His work invites engagement with these messages so that, whether delighting, moving or challenging, it still prompts viewers to participate in the dialogue and complete the artistic undertaking with their own actions.
Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.