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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.
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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.
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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.
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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")
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
![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
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.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
September, 2025 – May, 2026
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.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.