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. 

In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.

In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.

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.

This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.

Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.

This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.

By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.

Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.

The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.

The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.

The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.

These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.