-
Saturday, 11 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 1. The Wretched of the Earth I: The Anti-Colonial Revolt
Matadero Cinematheque, Azcona Theatre
Sarah Maldoror
Monangambée
Algeria, 1969, b&w, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 16mm transferred to digital, 17’Sambizanga
Angola and France, 1972–1973, colour, original version in Portuguese, Lingala and Mbundu with Spanish subtitles, 16mm transferred to digital, 102’Presented by: Sarah Maldoror
Two of the film-maker’s landmark films are screened in this session: Firstly, Monangambée, a chant meaning “white death” and a customary war cry against colonial exploitation in Angola. This short film describes the culturally incomprehensible abuses of Portuguese civil servants in the African country after the torture of a prisoner. Secondly, Sambizanga, a fictional feature-length film on the arrest of a member of the Movement of the Liberation of Angola and his wife and son’s relentless search for him. The film offers a feminist view against bureaucracy and the brutality of colonialism.
-
Sunday, 12 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 2. The Wretched of the Earth II: The Anti-Colonial Revolt
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Gillo Pontecorvo (assistant director: Sarah Maldoror)
La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers)
Algeria and Italy, 1965, b/w, original version in French and Arabic with Spanish subtitles, B-R, 121’Presented by: Annouchka de Andrade and Olivier Hadouchi
One of the most influential political films ever made, The Battle of Algiers vividly recreates Algeria’s turbulent struggle for liberation from French rule in the 1950s. Filmed documentary style on the streets of Algiers, the film constitutes a study of contemporary war, with terrorist attacks carried out by civilians and the brutal military techniques used to combat them. In this tour de force, Sarah Maldoror worked with Pontecorvo as assistant director.
-
Monday, 13 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 3. The Wretched of the Earth III: The Anti-Colonial Revolt
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Mathieu Klebeye Abonnenc
Préface à des fusils pour Banta
French Guyana, 2011, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 28’Round-table discussion between Annouchka de Andrade, Olivier Hadouchi and Mathieu Klebeye Abonnenc, moderated by Chema González
A film installation on Sarah Maldoror’s lost film, Des fussils pour Banta, her first feature which was deemed too ambiguous by Algeria’s revolutionary government and therefore seized. The round-table discussion following the screening seeks at once to place Sarah Maldoror in the context of Third Cinema and to study her role in a present that is battling against new forms of colonialism, as well as the poetic and political lessons that issue forth from her films and life.
-
Tuesday, 14 May 2019 - 9:30pm
Session 4. Land and Carnival I
Matadero Cinematheque, Borau Theatre
William Klein (assistant director: Sarah Maldoror)
Festival panafricain d'Alger [The Pan-African Festival of Algiers] RFA, Algeria and France, 1970, colour, original version in French and English with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 90’“African culture will be revolutionary, or it won’t be”, concludes this monumental fresco on Pan-Africanism as the thinking of emancipation. To the vibrant rhythm of black music by Miriam Makeba, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Marion Williams, the architects of new black culture appear in the film alongside the major theorists of decolonialisation and future national leaders, while texts on the screen pick apart the colonialist system and its machinery of oppression.
![William Klein. Festival panafricain d'Alger [The Pan-African Festival of Algiers]. Film, 1970](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/maldoror-4.gif "William Klein. Festival panafricain d'Alger [The Pan-African Festival of Algiers]. Film, 1970")
-
Wednesday, 15 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 5. Land and Carnival II
Matadero Cinematheque, Borau Theatre
Sarah Maldoror
A Bissau, le carnaval
Guinea-Bissau, 1980, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 18’Fogo, l´ile de feu
Cape Verde, 1979, colour, original version in Portuguese and French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 32’Un carnaval dans le Sahel
Cape Verde, 1979, colour, original version in Portuguese with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 15’Following her experience with guerrillas and international decolonial movements, Sarah Maldoror directed a film season on new nations at the request of the governments of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. As an approach to the history of colonisation and black culture, she uses carnival, understood as a festival with which to breach limits, whereby the dominator becomes the dominated. Concurrently, carnival bursts with music and impressions, a great collective performance engendering the identity qualities of Négritude.
-
Thursday, 16 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 6. Poetry: Aimé Cesaire
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Sarah Maldoror
Et les chiens se taiseient, d'Aimé Césaire
France, 1978, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 13’Aimé Césaire au bout du petit matin
France, 1977, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 57’This session focuses on the poet, intellectual, dramaturgist and politician Aimé Cesaire (1913–2008), author of Discourse on Colonialism (1950) and several pivotal poem collections on Négritude. In Et les chiens se taiseient (1946), Maldoror adapts a theatre piece on a rebel who, condemned to death, becomes aware of his otherness. The dialogue with his mother – both existentialist and autobiographical – reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Museum of Man, the old Trocadéro and an institution representing French colonial plundering, and is filmed through the mediation of Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris. Aimé Césaire au bout du petit matin tacks, on the landscape of Martinica, poetry readings, interviews with the writer and filmed theatre in a synthesis representing, through visual metaphors, the qualities of Césaire’s writing; “beautiful as nascent oxygen”, as André Breton wrote.
-
Friday, 17 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 7. Poetry: Two Worlds, Two Poets
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Sarah Maldoror
Louis Aragon, un masque à Paris
France, 1978, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 20’Léon G. Damas
France, 1994, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 26’This session brings together the last Surrealist poet in the inter-war period and the first in the new Surrealism of Négritude seen by Sarah Maldoror. Louis Aragon (1897–1982) is depicted with a red mask before his imagined museum, a huge archive of portraits, photographs and books, amassed in a disappearing world. Leon G. Damas (1912–1978), meanwhile, was the first poet to “live Négritude”, according to Leopold Senghor. Cosmopolitan and always in transit, his writing is a chorus of melodies and images imbued with angst and melancholy, and strongly influenced by jazz, blues and black music. This film, shot to the landscapes of Guyana with the voice of the artist, emerges from Maldoror’s keenness to create a poetic documentary.
-
Saturday, 18 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 8. The Women
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Ahmed Lallem (assistant director: Sarah Maldoror)
The Women
Algeria and France, 1966, colour, original version in French and Arabic with Spanish subtitles, 35mm, 22’Sarah Maldoror
Toto Bissainthe
Haiti, 1984, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 4’Ana Mercedes Hoyos
France and Colombia, 2009, colour, Spanish, digital archive, 13’In these female portraits the double subordinate condition of race and gender in the women portrayed can be perceived, not to mention their irrepressible energy. From the first to the last, Maldoror’s films meld anti-racism and a reflection on the place women occupy in the new decolonial society. This is the case in the medium-length film The Women, in which Ahmed Lallem, assisted by Maldoror, represents the aspirations of a group of young women after the independence of Algeria. Toto Bissainthe is a biographical sketch of the renowned Haitian singer and original member of Les griots, Sarah Maldoror’s theatre company of black actors, while Ana Mercedes Hoyos describes the career of the Colombian artist from the Atlantic side of Négritude and the traces of black culture in Colombia.
-
Sunday, 19 May 2019 - 7pm
Session 9. Paris Jazz: Anti-Racist Film in the Mainstream
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Sarah Maldoror
Un dessert pour Constance
France, 1980, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 60’Scala Milan A.C.
France, 2003, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 18’Les oiseaux mains
France, 2005, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 30’’Sarah Maldoror puts forward cinema that brings down identity stereotypes from the mainstream. These two films made for television come together to demonstrate the multi-culturalism of Parisian society, in spite of the predominant national culture: in the comedy Un dessert pour Constance, two street cleaners of African origin find a cookbook of classic French recipes, which they study for fun and become genuine experts, winning first prize in a typically middle class TV programme in France; in Scala Milan A.C., a group of suburban youths from different ethnic and geographical backgrounds decide to describe their neighbourhood to the rhythm of Archie Shepp’s jazz, shaping a poetic anthem to a racialised and invisible France. Finally, Les oiseaux mains is a brief animation on utopia in marginalisation, revealing the film-maker’s desire for continuous learning.
Sarah Maldoror, Négritude Poet and Film-maker
Held on 11, 18 May 2019
The first retrospective on Sarah Maldoror (Gers, France, 1929) in Spain rediscovers a vital film-maker whose work remains obscure, despite her huge commitment to the decolonial movement and the struggles for social diversity from 1960 onwards. Born Sarah Ducados to an Antillean father and a French mother, she took on the name Maldoror in homage to Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) by Lautréamont, a poet admired by the Surrealists. Such a gesture sought to breathe life into Surrealism from the tenets of Négritude, an artistic, social and political movement she would become a major exponent of, with her work responding at once to the search for poetic form with which to express an alternative identity and the promise of a future society offering new black culture emanating from anti-colonialism and Pan-Africanism during the 1960s.
In 1961 Maldoror went to Moscow to study film, and it was there that she met Ousmane Sembène, the great Senegalese film-maker, and began working on vibrant and syncopated montages to rhythms of jazz and black music. Upon her return to France she joined the struggles of the African emancipation movements, complementing her films with essays by Amílcar and Luis Cabral, Joaquim and Mário de Andrade. A condemnation of the colonialist system is at the core of her best-known films: Monangambée, Sambizanga and La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), in which she collaborated as assistant director to Gillo Pontecorvo.
The aforementioned films, shot in Algeria and the Congo at the height of anti-colonial uprisings, denounce the repression of people and the use of torture against guerrillas from an anti-racist and feminist perspective of emancipation, in keeping with the film-maker’s oeuvre. Despite a strong political commitment, her work eschewed propaganda, so much so that Algeria’s revolutionary government considered her first feature, Des fusils pour Banta, too ambiguous and seized it – the film has not seen the light of day until now. The thrilling prospect of a society without Western rule paved the way for a new line of work, in which African identity is explored through festivals and carnivals, leading to a collaboration with William Klein in the huge 1969 fresco Festival panafricain d'Alger (The Pan-African Festival of Algiers), showing the carnivals of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
In the wake of this militant period, Maldoror approached Négritude as a poetics of difference. Based on Pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism and the synthesis between Marxism and Surrealism, Négritude is a cultural movement founded by poets Aimé Cesaire (Martinica, 1913–2018), Leopold Senghor (Senegal, 1906–2001) and Leon G. Damas (France, 1912–1978). It had such a strong influence on Sarah Maldoror that her films would be defined as a translation of the three writers’ poetry into images and sound, a visual manifesto of Négritude manifested in the consideration of identity as the result of relations, the constant presence of orality, the poetic word, and the frenetic rhythm of sonorous music.
Curatorship
Chema González
Locations
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building, Auditorium - Santa Isabel, 52
Matadero Madrid
Cinematheque, Azcona and Borau Theatres – Plaza de Legazpi, 8
With the support of
Acknowledgements
Embassy of Algeria in Spain, Cinematheque of Algeria, Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères, Center national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) and CNRS Images
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and DocumentaMadrid 2019 (16th International Documentary Film Festival)
Participants
Annouchka de Andrade is Sarah Maldoror’s daughter and one of the main figures behind the recovery of her work.
Mathieu Klebeye Abonnenc is an Antillean artist whose work approaches Sarah Maldoror’s and who looks to rebuild the affection and personal threads of the early decolonial movement.
Olivier Hadouchi is a researcher, professor and independent programmer who has worked tirelessly to recover militant and decolonial cinema from the 1960s and 1970s.
Chema González is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural Activities and Audovisuals and the curator of this series.
Itinerancies
Buenos Aires, Argentina
22 September, 2020 - 29 September, 2020
Más actividades
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026 - Registration deadline extended
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?