Adolpho Arrietta

A twist on the myth of Pygmalion inspired by the living sculptures of Argentinian artist Alberto Greco (1931–1965), an acquaintance of Arrietta’s in Madrid in the 1960s. The ex-wife of a renowned sculptor convinces her lover to steal the statue her former husband has made for his forthcoming exhibition at the historic Yvon Lambert Gallery. Her lover sees no other option but to put a model there as a real sculpture, which ends up being acquired by a Brazilian collector. Played by professional actors Michèle Moretti and Howard Vernon, as well as amateur actors, such as the transgender community of Les Gazolines, and with counterculture icons Marie France and Hélène Hazéra, the film is a musical about cruising, partying and costume in the post-radical Paris of May ‘68, and a drama which straddles traditional marriage and new amorous forms.

“Jonas Mekas showed me this film when I was living in his house on Wooster Street in 1975. I met him after Les intrigues de Sylvia Couski won an award at the Toulon Festival in 1974; he was on the Jury and invited me to New York. He showed me The Brig because it bore little relation to what I knew of his work, his diaries. The film is more in the ilk of classical cinema, and I was surprised by how raw and hard-hitting it is. It is the Living Theater that acts in it, but I knew nothing; for me, it was so real that it seemed more like fiction than documentary. It was hugely emotional, a hard slap. After being with Jonas and his friends, for instance Flo and Ken Jacobs, and Andy Warhol, I was really stimulated and understood that my idea of film was not madness or extravagance. I had a great time and felt highly stimulated by them all”. Adolpho Arrietta

This film, with shades of Buñuel, is about the author of a book called Tam-Tam — played by painter Javier Grandes and with a likeness to Arrietta — who is in New York when really he should be attending a private party in Paris, his absence conspicuous while everyone is waiting for him. Tam-Tam is an altarpiece led by mysterious, attractive characters, denizens of the counterculture of the time, for instance writers Severo Sarduy, Enrique Vila-Matas and Michi Panero, trans designer Maud Molyneux and activist model Paquita Paquin, inviting us to lose ourselves in a never-ending Parisian soirée. Arrietta used a camera lent to him by Jonas Mekas to shoot the opening in New York. The glam-toned, dandyesque improvised dialogues and a visually baroque style speak of the mix between life and cinema. We hear a tam-tam in the background: “Is it the apocalypse”, one character asks. “We are the apocalypse”, answers the other.

Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.

A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.  

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.

Nuestra tierra (Our Land, 2025) is Argentinian film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary and her most recent work. The film focuses on the legal case surrounding the murder, in 2009, of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Los Chuschagasta Indigenous community, who was killed while  resisting  the forced displacement of  ancestral land located in northern Argentina, territory  hiscommunity has inhabited and farmed for centuries. 

Drawning on fragments of the above-mentioned trial, which took place in 2019, as well as a meticulous reconstruction of the history of Los Chuschagasta since the seventeenth century, Martel decries how colonial violence, far from being a relic of the past, underlies current political and social structures and ends in the mistreatment and systematic invisibility of Indigenous peoples.   

Lucrecia Martel is a director and screenwriter widely regarded asone of the most relevant film-makers in the twenty-first-centuryLatin American cinema. To date, she has directed four feature-length films: La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), Zama (2001), La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer rubia (The Blonde Woman, 2008), all of which have been awarded at film festivals, including recognitions  in the Official Selection at Cannes.  Accross her work Martel explores the complexities of an Argentina shaped by the political and social crisis of the 1990s and by the burden of a colonial past, which she translates into her own visual language of documentary, paradoxically offsetting it against fiction. As Martel asserts: “What I do is all lies, all artifice. I don’t believe in the truth and, if there is any effect of truth in my films, then it’s a miracle”. 

These notions, the germinating material of her films, enable a reflection on how the tactics of fiction and imagination, materialized thought creativity, can function as powerful means  of resisting the erasure of memory and as a tactic of reparative justice. This line of thought also underpins READ Madrid. The Festival of Books and Ideas, which frames the screening of this film.  

READ Madrid is a space of encounter for critical and experimental voices in the sphere of literature and theory. The festival gathers a transatlantic framework of voices related to writing, art and publishing, whose practices challenge hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and make room for performative and cinematic forms as expanded forms of research. 

READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.

In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.

The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.