The Collection Screened

The Collection Screened is a new programme built around materials selected from the Museo Reina Sofía’s film, video and moving image holdings and displayed in the Museo’s Cinema theatre. The programme seeks at once to throw into relief audiovisual works which are seldom exhibited or lack visibility in their entirety and to highlight or broaden an episode, history or artist that is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collections.     

This inaugural programme pays homage to the uniqueness of film-maker Adolpho Arrietta, a pivotal figure in international underground cinema, with the screening of two films by the director acquired by the Museo in 2012: Las intrigas de Sylvia Couski (The Adventures of Sylvia Couski, 1974) and Tam-tam (1976), in addition to a carte blanche session, where Arrietta selects Jonas Mekas’s film The Brig (1964) from the Museo’s Film Collection. The director will deliver a presentation in all sessions.

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened is the programme Vital Challenge: Defiant Actions from and about the Body, curated by Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art. The programme seeks to explore specific aspects related to identity and self-representation, which coalesce to form a point of departure and a horizon that stretches across the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The screenings in this programme also converse with pioneering approaches from the 1970s and 1980s focused on audiovisual experimentation and traversed by a vindication of the body and identities.   

The series, moreover, is structured around three double-screening sessions: We Go On from Here… And Will Not Move approaches performance based on the self-display of the body; Other Voices in Us All prompts a confrontation of reason from sensibility and emotion; and Economy of Hate premieres Diego del Pozo Barriuso’s Oído Odio (Heard Hate).

Framed inside The Collection Screened is the programme Present Time: Insurgent Images, curated by Luis López Carrasco, a key film-maker with a distinguished international career whose work deals with memory, activism and collectivity. The works in the programme, selected from the Museo’s film and video collection, interlink projects that are conceptual, refined, systematic — as an X-ray of their time in history — with firebrand domestic and activist films, comprehending different political emergencies from the second half of the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America. These works are viewed in light of a genealogy of revolt which buries its roots in the nineteenth century.    

For theorist Siegfried Kracauer, one essential distinguishing feature of the film image is its capacity to depict daily life — film captures fragments of the lives of anonymous people with unprecedented closeness and intimacy. French critic Serge Daney also considered the moving image as an “art of the present”, a mode of representation which captures a specific segment of time, a time which unfolds before our eyes in each screening.   

Present Time. Insurgent Images sets forth a micro-history of daily life under Franco’s dictatorship, from the popular and Cartesian depiction of the Puerta del Sol set out by Javier Aguirre in Objetivo 40º (1968–1970) to the revealing panoramic views of urban fringes by Dorothée Selz in Desplaçaments dels aparells d’imatges i so (1974), via street, child and proletarian expression rarely shown with the rawness with which Joan Colom portrays Barcelona in the 1960s in El carrer. This micro-history entwines the 1970s, rural ethnography and the anti-imperialist stance of the Grupo de Cine Liberación sin Rodeos from Peru, whose emancipatory message reverberates in the chronology of the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, a session which concludes Luis López Carrasco’s essay based on the Museo’s audiovisual collection.    

The series, moreover, shows private images that possess the will to be public. Images which project futures in which these insurgent energies can find audiences to proliferate through; images which seek, in conclusion, to recall that which must not be forgotten and to speak in an increasingly urgent way about our present. 

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.

This session advances a programme focused on the most elemental side of performance: a simple, direct act that starts from the self-exhibition of the body. At certain points, from the calculated serenity of Miguel Benlloch’s Tengo tiempo (I Have Time, 1994); at other times, from the challenging and visceral impulse of Bollos (Buns, 1996), by Cabello y Carceller, or the rage of Habla (Talk, 2008), by Cristina Lucas; and, finally, from video-graphic experimentation, disconcerting and sustained in the dance culture of Moving Backwards (2019), by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose mise en scène reminds us that it is not actually déjà vu but the present, unfortunately, that moves through a reactionary period. 

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. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.

 

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.

Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.  

The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.  

Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.