Ceija Stojka. Untitle, 1995. Acrylic on cardboard, 69,5 x 99 cm. Antoine de Galbert Collection, Paris. © Ceija Stojka, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019. Photography: © Célia Pernot
Held on 22 nov 2019
Inside the framework of the exhibition Ceija Stojka. This Has Happened, (Museo Reina Sofía, 22 November 2019 – 23 March 2020), this encounter reflects upon the relationship between art and memory in relation to the Romani genocide (porrajmos in Romani) during the Second World War. The session will comprise a round-table discussion between film-maker and writer Karin Berger, anthropologist David Berna and artist and researcher María García Ruiz; the screening of Canta gitano (1981) by French-Algerian film-maker Tony Gatlif, of Romani descent; and a concert performed by the gypsy association Mujeres con Propósito (Women with Purpose), from Madrid’s Embajadores neighbourhood.
The different gypsy ethnicities in Europe have endured a long history of persecution and discrimination since they first settled in the continent in the 15th century. However, the genocide planned by Nazi Germany is, without question, the worst example of the systematic extermination of the Romani people on European soil. Known as the porrajmos, this event in history is overshadowed somewhat by other tragic events from the same period, such as the Holocaust, and, even today, despite the loss of between 255,000 and 500,000 human lives, it is not remembered, either socially or politically, the way it should be. Behind it are numerous issues associated with the place of the gypsy community in today’s European nations, namely: their exclusion from official records and their transnational, nomadic past; in short, the stereotyped imagery of otherness, misunderstood as something intrinsic yet caused by sustained structural discrimination. The reasons stated above mean the surviving memories of the porrajmos do not possess the same recognition as survivors of the Shoah, and are less monumental in scope and yet to be fictionalised in popular culture or with any form of poetic and autobiographical expression that differs from the simple narration of facts.
In this respect, personal writing — such as diaries — visual arts, and performance arts form all-important manifestos to express the significance of the porrajmos. One such example is the artist Ceija Stojka (Kraubath, Austria, 1933 – Vienna, Austria, 2013), a gypsy from the Lovara community who survived the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration and extermination camps, together with just five members of a 200-member extended family.
Stojka rendered an account of this traumatic experience four decades later through writing, painting and drawing in what was an intense exercise of remembrance. Breaking the silence she had kept for so many years on the persecution that she personally and the gypsy people collectively suffered was not only of huge symbolic significance; it also fostered the associationism of the Romani community and the vindication of reparation policies in her country. Therefore, upon her death in 2013, she was recognised as one of the most emphatic European voices against discrimination and historical amnesia, and this activity analyses her story and the work of other Sinti and Romani gypsies who drew on the visual arts, film and music to narrate the porrajmos.
With the support of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Karin Berger is a film-maker and writer. In her work she explores women’s historical struggles against National Socialism, whilst challenging stereotypes in representations of the Romani people. She has directed two documentaries on the artist Ceija Stojka: Ceija Stojka. Porträt einer Romní (Ceija Stojka. Portrait of a Romani Woman, 1999) and Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras (The Green Green Grass Beneath, 2005), and has edited three of the artist’s autobiographies: Wir leben im Verborgenen (We Live in Seclusion, Picus Verlag, 1988), Reisende auf dieser Welt (Travellers on this World, Picus Verlag, 1992) and Träume ich, dass ich lebe? (Am I Dreaming That I Am Alive?, Picus Verlag, 2015).
David Berna is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). A specialist in gypsy studies, he has published a broad number of essays on sexual identity and the gypsy community, for example “Cartografías desde los márgenes. Gitanos gays en el Estado español” (Cartographies from the margins. Gay gypsies in the Spanish State), in Lucas R. Platero (ed.)., Intersecciones: cuerpos y sexualidades en la encrucijada (Bellaterra, 2012), and “Un golpe de estado y dos billetes de autobús. Mujeres gitanas, sexo y amor en la dictadura” (One coup d’état and two bus tickets. Gypsy women, sex and love in the dictatorship), in Raquel Osborne (ed.)., Mujeres bajo sospecha. Memoria y sexualidad 1930-1980 (Fundamentos, 2012).
María García Ruiz is a visual artist and researcher. She has a degree in Architecture and is currently working on her PhD in Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the ways of inhabiting that characterised gypsy nomadism at the turn of the 20th century and are related to avant-garde art and architecture. Moreover, she curated, with Pedro G. Romero, Máquinas de vivir. Flamenco y arquitectura en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios (Machines for Living. Flamenco and Architecture in the Occupation and Vacating of Spaces, CentroCentro, Madrid, 2017–2018).
Mujeres con Propósito is a group made up of gypsy women who are residents in Madrid’s Embajadores neighbourhood and who, over the past ten years, have gathered to share and learn. As a collective they have undertaken forms of art and music, participating in different social projects in the neighbourhood.
6pm
Andalusian gypsy singing with Mujeres con Propósito
6:16pm
Round-table discussion with Karin Berger, David Berna and María García Ruiz
7:30pm
Screening of Tony Gatlif’s Canta gitano
France, 1981, colour, sound, digital archive, 14’
7:45pm Andalusian gypsy singing with Mujeres con Propósito in the rooms of the exhibition Ceija Stojka. This Has Happened
![Ceija Stojka. Gefangennahme und Abtransport [Arrest and Deportation], 1995. Acrylic on cardboard, 70 x 100 cm. Wien Museum, Vienna. © Ceija Stojka, VEGAP, Madrid, 2019. Photography: © Wien Museum / Birgit and Peter Kainz](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/cejia2g.gif.webp)
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.
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.
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.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.
![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)