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From 26 June to 2 July 2020
Session 1. AIDS, the Other Pandemic
Total session length: 45’
Gran Fury. Kissing Doesn’t Kill
USA, 1990, colour, sound, video, 2’10’’ (Four 30’ adverts). Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Link to Vimeo: Kissing Doesn’t KillBarbara Hammer. Save Sex
USA, 1993, colour, sound, video, 1’. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Link to Vimeo: Save SexDavid Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler. Fear of Disclosure
USA, 1989, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 5’
Link to Vimeo : Fear of DisclosureBarbara Hammer. Vital Signs
USA, 1991, colour and b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm transferred to video, 10’. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Link to Vimeo: Vital SignsTom Rubnitz. Listen to This
USA, 1992, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 15’
Performer: David Wojnarowicz
Link to Vimeo: Listen to ThisBarbara Hammer. Snow Job. The Media Hysteria of AIDS
USA, 1986, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, video, 7’35''. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Link to Vimeo: Snow Job. The Media Hysteria of AIDSPepe Espaliú. Carrying
Spain, 1993, colour, original version in Spanish, video, 2’15’’ (extract)
Link to Vimeo: CarryingThis session centres on the activism in video and in experimental film that came into existence in conjunction with the AIDS pandemic. The first part deals with the vindication of the visibility of LGTB desire confronted with the public authorities’ criminalisation of homosexuality. In Kissing Doesn’t Kill, the Gran Fury collective appropriate the aesthetics of general-interest advertising to demonstrate how the problem lies not in sexual diversity, but in government inaction and indifference in terms of disinformation. The campaign, which was never broadcast after it was initially commissioned by ABC and then later cancelled by the same network, is a classic of guerrilla communication during the spread of AIDS. In Save Sex and Fear of Disclosure, Barbara Hammer and David Wojnarowicz explore contact after testing HIV positive: Hammer shows the usual ritual of putting on and touching with gloves, and with Wojnarowicz two male go-go dancers dance and frantically touch as a voice, belonging to journalist Phil Zwickler, co-creator of the piece, speaks of the panic of physical contact with the virus. In Vital Signs, Hammer pays homage to three friends and family who passed during the pandemic — John Wilbert Hammer, her father, film-maker Curt McDowell, and Vito Russo, an LGTB activist and film historian — using the theme of macabre dance. The concerns of the other productions rest in media-created paranoia swirling around the disease. In Listen to This, Wojnarowicz plays a news presenter who delivers a tirade against the moralism and hypocrisy of American society. In Snow Job… Hammer shows a collage made with newspaper headlines that incite fear and denote the ignorance of the public perception of AIDS; “just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness”, writes the artist. The session concludes with an extract from the historic performance Carrying by Pepe Espaliú, an HIV-positive artist who in his final months of life was carried through the air in a human chain from the Congreso de los Diputados (Spain’s Congress of Deputies) to the Museo Reina Sofía. The action was peppered with references: the involvement of the public sphere to fight the pandemic, the artist as an icon with the slogan “the personal is political” and the role of the museum as a political institution and in care, a role we wish to emphasise in this new start.
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From 3 to 9 July 2020
Session 2. The Others Are the Disease
Jean-Daniel Pollet. L´ordre (The Order)
France, 1973, colour, original version in Greek and French, digital archive, 40’
Link to Vimeo: L´ordre (The Order)New film restored. This session features a presentation by Guillermo G. Peydró, a film essay historian and curator of the retrospective devoted to Jean-Daniel Pollet in the Punto de vista festival in 2016.
Pollet, one of the pre-eminent documentary essay makers, was commissioned by a pharmaceutical company to speak about the final days of leprosy in Europe in a film that becomes a profound meditation on the differences between the disease and supposed normality. The camera pans across deserted spaces on the abandoned Greek island of Spinalonga, officially called Kalydon, a leper colony from 1904 to 1956, the year in which an effective treatment put an end to enforced reclusion and patients started to be transferred over to hospitals in Athens. Raimondakis, a leper confined for 36 years and a clairvoyant, is the documentary’s guiding light and explains how the awareness of being ill does not start with physical symptoms, but rather with adherence to a new social order based on the discrimination between good people and bad, between the healthy and outcasts. Raimondakis describes how Spinalonga, paradoxically, used to be a hugely respected society with community support, integrated into nature, life, and the transition to death. “Where is the abnormality, in Spinalonga or on the outside?”, he asks.
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From 10 to 16 July 2020
Session 3. Living Under the Plague
Meredith Monk. Book of Days
USA, 1988, b/w, original version in English, digital archive, 74’
Link to Vimeo: Book of daysWith an interview with Meredith Monk conducted by John Killacky in 2006.
“Book of Days is a film about time which looks to trace a parallel between the Middle Ages — a time of war, plague, fear of the Apocalypse — and modern times of racial and religious conflicts, the AIDS epidemic and the fear of nuclear annihilation. In light of the current 2020 pandemic, the cyclical nature of this phenomenon has completely re-emerged. The film does not offer answers; it is a homage to vision and imagination, a poetic incantation of what connects us,” Meredith Monk wrote recently. With an original score by the artist, film-maker and composer, this film speaks of beauty in times of extinction.
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Monday, 20 July 2020 — 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. Macabre Dances and Other Allegories
Second session: Wednesday, 22 July 2020 — 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. Ape-bat
Italy, 2020, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 2’Pierre Léon, Rita Azevedo Gomes and Jean-Louis Schefer. Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantaisies (Macabre Dances, Skeletons and Other Fantasies)
Spanish preview. France, Portugal, Switzerland, 2019, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 110’The final session of the second part of the series Uncertain Times reopens the Auditorium after a four-month hiatus. How can an image of the pandemic be put forward that reflects death as much as the resistance to disappearance? With Ape-bat, Yervant Gianikian, a film-maker just shy of 80, composes from his confinement and solitude in Milan another macabre dance that helps him to overcome his fear, in an emblem on the origins of the coronavirus extracted from the film Fragments, made with Angela Ricci-Lucchi in 1987. Further, in Macabre Dances, Skeletons and Other Fantasies, historian Jean-Louis Schefer, with film-makers Pierre Léon and Rita Azevedo, returns to the late-medieval theme of the allegory of death, placing the stress heavily on the successive waves of the Plague in Europe. The skeletons dancing with powerful figures (popes, kings) recall the universality of death, and the necessity to revel in life.
![Pierre Léon, Rita Azevedo Gomes y Jean-Louis Schefer. Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantaisies [Danzas macabras, esqueletos y otras fantasías]. Película, 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/legacy_programs/4_6.gif "Pierre Léon, Rita Azevedo Gomes y Jean-Louis Schefer. Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantaisies [Danzas macabras, esqueletos y otras fantasías]. Película, 2019")
Uncertain Times II. Representing the Pandemic
![Barbara Hammer. Vital Signs [Signos vitales]. Película, 1991. Cortesía de Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Nueva York](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/tiempos-g.gif.webp)
Held on 26 Jun, 03, 10, 17 Jul 2020
The Museo’s usual film and video programme was brought to a standstill on 12 March of this year by the COVID-19 health emergency, along with all its other on-site activities. Thus, Uncertain Times is an audiovisual series designed to be viewed on the Museo Reina Sofía website during such an atypical situation. The first part, which ran from 8 May to 4 June under the subheading Cinema During Lockdown, pivoted on the experience of confinement, while this second part explores the representation of the pandemic over three online sessions and a fourth celebrating the reopening of the Sabatini Auditorium. This will be followed, from the end of July to the end of August, by the outdoor summer cinema in the Museo’s rooftop terraces, denoting the final instalment of a series devoted to possible futures in these new times.
The COVID-19 pandemic that befell the world at the beginning of 2020 has engendered the collapse of the present continuous that defined our contemporary condition. The lack of theoretical approaches to precede and help us understand this situation has been overcompensated by a frenzied deluge of conjectural information, with this absence giving rise to a gaze towards other times and historical periods in the quest for parallels and answers. The fascination with the plague in the Middle Ages in Europe, the Americas and its deadly plagues at the onset of colonialism, or the Western world at the height of the spread of AIDS, have taken root in the collective imagination as a new historicism to find answers on how to live during an epidemic. Given that we are now seeing a progressive return to normality, in whatever form that may be, and with its restorative amnesia, this series seeks to reflect on pandemics and their representations at different times and in different audiovisual languages.
The first session bears the title AIDS, the Other Pandemic and is framed inside the special programme offered by the Museo during LGTBIQ+ Pride. It explores life and the fear of infection, and the fight against disinformation psychosis promulgated by the mass media. Salient among collectives such as Gran Fury and artists such as Pepe Espaliú are Barbara Hammer, whose work replaces vision with tactile experience in her investigations of lesbian experimental film, and David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist whose work and life were an exercise in against-the-grain survival in Reagan’s America.
In The Others Are the Disease, film-maker Jean-Daniel Pollet contemplates the new social order caused by a pandemic through one of the last outbreaks of leprosy in Europe, on an island-prison with inmates who live in harmony together and with nature. Living Under the Plague retrieves a beautiful and little-known docudrama by performer Meredith Monk, who, in a cyclical temporality, reconstructs the material and musical culture of the Middle Ages during the Plague. Finally, the last session, Macabre Dances and Other Allegories, reopens the Museo’s Auditorium with the preview in Spain of two films: a short film made by film-maker Yervant Gianikian during lockdown about a prophesy on the origins of the virus found in a colonial film from the early twentieth century, and Danzas macabras, esqueletos y otras fantasias (Macabre Dances, Skeletons and Other Fantasies), a feature-length film by Pierre Léon, Rita Azevedo Gomes and Jean-Louis Schefer.
Comisariado
Chema González
Línea-fuerza
Malestares contemporáneos
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
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.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.