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18 September, 2013
Eloy Enciso
Arraianos
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain,In Gallician with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 70’.
Screening format: Blu-ray
Between existentialism and scepticism, Arraianos blends a mythical moment with a historical moment. The film appears to reflect on the rapidly disappearing agrarian way of life, using a cinematic language that contains references to Pedro Costa and Straub-Huillet. The Arraianos, the inhabitants of the border region shared by Galicia and Portugal, are, however, a fictional people, the roles being performed by amateur actors that recite, with distance, dialogues taken from the theatrical piece O bosque (1977), by Jenaro Marinhas. Under the pretext of filming an identity, Arraianos shows the discourses that invent such an identity.
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20 September, 2013
Pablo Cayuela and Xan Gómez Viñas
Fóra
The co-director of the film, Xan Gómez Viñas, will be present
Technical specifications:2012. Spain. V.O.S.E. In Galician, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 95'.
Screening format: Blu-ray
The insane asylum: factory or landscape? With this reflection begins this look at the history of the insane asylum located in Conxo and at the institutional repression of insanity. Founded at the end of the 19th century on the outskirts of Santiago, the asylum was the site of one of the most important moments of the anti-psychiatric movement taking place between 1972-1975, when, according to one of the doctors there, “while trying to free the insane, we freed ourselves.” The film, with echoes of Peter Robinson and Joaquim Jordà, is built on a visual atlas of documents that shows the traces of a resistant subjectivity.
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25 September, 2013
Sergio Caballero
Finisterrae
Technical specifications: 2010. Spain. In Polish, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 80’.
Screening format: Betacam digital
With a dense web of references ranging from the Buñuel of La Voie Lactée to the Garrel of La cicatrice intérieure, and including also elements of road movie and music video, Caballero alludes to an accumulative, but not eclectic, state of the image. Finisterrae narrates the adventures of two ghosts who are tired of living and decide to follow the Pilgrim's Road to Santiago in order to regain their mortality. Meanwhile, a number of unconnected situations take place, representative of the search for an extravagant and exaggerated meaning that is able to create amazement once again in response to what is being told.
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26 September, 2013
Albert Serra
Història de la meva mort
The filmmaker will be present. National premiere
Technical specifications: 2013. Spain and France. In Catalan, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 140'.
Screening format: 35 mm
Like the 200 hour-long monologues by Goethe, Hitler and Fassbinder in his previous film, Els tres porquets (2012), here also Serra presents a twilight story based on text and its interpretation. Historia de la méva mort tells of the slow decline of European civilization by using another anachronism, the encounter between an enlightened Casanova and a pre-romantic Dracula. The films suggests that licentiousness as an exercise in autonomy and emancipation of the subject is beginning to be replaced by uncertainty and contemporary superstition.
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2 October, 2013
Sergio Oksman
A story for the Modlins
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications:2012. Spain. V.O.S.E. In English, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 26'.
Screening format: Hard disk
The emotional charge of Barthes' punctum in response to the realism of photography is the resource used to tell this story. The film takes place on the line between what is true and what seems to be true, between what images document and what they invent. The discovery of a suitcase full of old photos leads the narrator to a wild tale that starts in the New York apartment seen in Rosemary's Baby and ends in an apartment on Calle Pez in Madrid. A Story for the Modlins shows the sophistication of the poetics of the found material.
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4 October, 2013
Oskar Alegría
La casa Emak Bakia
Technical Specifications: 2012. Spain, in Spanish, colour and sound, 83’
Screening format: Blu-ray
This film, the first feature by Oskar Alegría, is a complex narrative artefact configured around the search for the house where Man Ray filmed Emak Bakia (1926), one of the fundamental surrealist films. At the same time, it is an essay that develops amidst the figurative and material footprints left by the early avant-gardes, and also an inquiry into mystical journeys of initiation where, as if in a theatre of images, the social types of the early 20th century circulate.
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9 October, 2013
Víctor Iriarte
Invisible
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain. In Spanish, colour and sound, 65’
Screening fomat: Hard disk
Invisible plays in the area between what is shown and what is hidden, between the expectation of what viewers think they will see and what they actually see. The film “illustrates” its argument with segments from the soundtrack's production process. Heavily influenced by performance and video art, this film provides an example of filmmaking based on both listening and seeing. The text, music and narrative intertitles reduce the centrality of the image, and give the spectator renewed protagonism.
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10 October, 2013
Virginia García del Pino
El Jurado
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain. In Spanish, colour and sound, 60’
Screening format: Blu-ray
Over a period of 60 minutes El Jurado tells the story of a real murder as narrated by lawyers, witnesses and the accused during the trial. However, there is no mise-en-scéne or documentation in images, just close-up views of the pixelated, almost abstract, faces of some members of the jury. The successive reactions in their faces indicate that this film is about the rhetoric of the speaker and the scepticism of the listener, now playing the role of judge.
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16 October, 2013
Óscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot
Hollywood Talkies
The co-director of the film, Mia de Ribot, will be present
Technical specifications: 2011. Spain. In English, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 61'
Screening format: Blu-ray
This film explores fiction within fiction. In the early years of talking pictures, before dubbing, Hollywood decided to expand to the South American market by duplicating its most successful films with Spanish actors. During the years of the Spanish Republic, a large group of actors, screenplay writers and technicians travelled from Spain to Los Angeles to act in these uncanny reproductions, reinforcing paradoxically the Latino stereotypes. The film Hollywood Talkies, based on still photos and shot in the places actually used during the project, is the chronicle of a failure, presented as a ghost story.
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17 October, 2013
Adrià Julià
Negative Inchon (from the Notes on the Missing Oh series)
The artist will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Toning, no sound, 14’
Screening format: 16 mm
Oh, Inchon!, which premiered briefly as Inchon (1981), is a super production about the 1950 landing of U.S. forces during the Korean War. It is also the story of one of the greatest Hollywood fiascos ever. The film, considered by many to be racist and colonialist, was withdrawn from cinemas and put in a warehouse just a week after release. In the series Notes on the Missing Oh, Adrià Julià explores the film, its context, spaces and discourse, as a story about the limits of the film industry. Negative Inchon is the projection on film of the digital version of Inchon, which was posted on Youtube by an anonymous user and filmed again, in negative, by the artist.

Held on 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 sep, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 oct 2013
In recent years, it has been pointed out that one of the identifying features of Spanish alternative film is the exploration of the real. This series, however, looks at the other side, the return to a narrative that, formulated upon the basis of allegory, expropriated stories and the renewed role of the spectator, flows beyond the space of stories.
Fiction, in the logic of film discourse, is usually considered a closed system that presents an airtight world set up by the filmmaker. The film shoot, following this idea, responds to a rigid staging process designed to ensure the translation of the work from screenplay to moving images. In contrast, the ten films chosen for this series challenge this condition which, using the ideas of Noël Burch, might be described as the exile of chance. With a variety of media and enunciations, the selected filmmakers and artists understand fiction to be a multiplication of experience and a cross between the subjectivities that give it meaning, a meaning that is anything but univocal and instead appears in an ongoing state of interrogation. If more orthodox film generally engages in an image fetishism that, in the sense put forward by Benjamin, erases any tie between the image and its means of production, the films included in Unending Stories use images and their narrative with the opposite intention: as a medium for questioning who, how and from which vantage point the story is told. So, here the story is not a life-like mask by which to convey the real, but rather an element with which to broaden the real.
The Unending Stories program looks into different ways of telling. In the first place, there is telling that uses history's fundamental archetypes, such as in the case of Història de la meva mort by Albert Serra and Finisterrae by Sergi Caballero, treated here from the perspective of allegory and the grotesque. Secondly, the telling can use objects found and resignified within the story, such as La casa Emak Bakia, by Oskar Alegría, and A Story for the Modlins, by Sergio Oksman. Thirdly, stories can be told by examining myth as the repetition that builds identity, whether that of a community, as with Arrianos by Eloy Enciso, or of a territory, as with Conxo in Fóra , by Pablo Cayuela and Xan Gómez Viñas. Fourthly, the telling might entail showing the role of the spectator in the construction of a supposed truth derived from the dispute between image and language, such as in El jurado, by Virginia García del Pino, and Invisible , by Víctor Iriarte. And lastly, there is the telling that develops the fiction as an archive from which to excavate the stories buried by the “film” institution, as in Hollywood Talkies by Óscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot and Negative Inchon by Adrià Juliá.
In short, Unending Stories features a series of recent audiovisual works driven by a new type of narrative that, far from exhausting the real, takes it to a new irreducible state.
Itinerancies
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
18 September, 2013 - 17 October, 2013
Palacio de los Condes de Gabia. Diputación de Granada
30 January, 2014 - 27 March, 2014
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.
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.
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.