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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
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.