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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
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?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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 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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
12 DIC 2025
This second instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common space, comprises three sessions with Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker Christian Nyampeta and Ècole du soir. The programme’s first session screens video works made by Nyampeta, while the second sets forth a dialogue on the creative processes of Ècole du soir. The third brings proceedings to a close with the screening of a film selected by the artist: Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992).
The work of Christian Nyampeta 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.
The New York-based artist from Rwanda uses art and museums to create spaces of encounter and common learning that predate colonial education models. Via popular culture frames of reference like comics, music and film, Nyampeta develops dynamics and spaces from which to build experiences which redress the wounds of diaspora and its consequences; further, his work recovers, makes visible and heals — through a pedagogical and artistic process — the social divides of the African people. With Ècole du soir he also works on creations without authorship and uses the counter-ethnographic legacy of novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembène as a tool to deconstruct the Western view of Africa.