Playback: The Sublime Image

— With a presentation and talk by Manel Muntaner 

The film series closes with a dystopian vision of the 1980s, a piece which is regarded as a cult work in Spanish video and hitherto one of the most forgotten. In Especial 84, Manel Muntaner intermingles key passages from George Orwell’s 1984 with contemporary images of surveillance, domination, violence, resistance and subjugation. The video recalls the dark side of the 1980s, a time of neo-conservative shifting in international politics and the AIDS pandemic, by way of a carefully chosen selection of fictional extracts and real news, apocalyptically narrated with a voiceover that seems to turn Orwell’s warning into an urgent prophecy.

The sixth session is a return to video’s narrative dimension at its most cinematic, while also incorporating, with maturity, the traits of the medium — collage, the rupture of a film grammar and the nature of recording lived experience — through the screening of two cult medium-length films. In Pornada (a wordplay with “porn” and “working day”) the inhabitants of an unusual Castilian town labour to get a telephone service as they dig their own grave in a local cemetery for entertainment; Hispanic Surrealism, a reflection on Spain’s rural exodus and humour along the lines of José Luis Cuerda are concentrated in this unique video by Javier Codesal, a milestone in the medium. The work of Manuel Abad, meanwhile, is a tragic and melancholy meditation on suicide in Galicia using the aesthetics of collage that is characteristic of video.

Video-Nou (1977–1979) was a Barcelona collective that used video as a medium for criticism, participation and social intervention during the Transition to democracy in Spain, their work committed to horizontal communication and the collective production of videos with communities. The practice of the collective — made up of Carles Ameller, Genís Cano, Albert Estival, Xefo Guasch, Marga Latorre, Pau Maragall, Lluïsa Ortínez, Lluïsa Roca and Joan Úbeda — made video a popular tool with which to recognise, through collective voices, dissipated authorships and natural performers, the nascent society at the time. This session presents a compilation of the collective’s best works, from neighbourhood life and street assemblies to developmentalism in Barcelona, its environmental consequences and the new political landscape. A fresco of 1970s Spain.

— With a presentation and talk by Julián Álvarez 

How does video’s new gaze recognise space in its different dimensions? Batlàntic puts forward a tangible representation of financial abstraction in contemplating on the glass architecture of a multinational bank a superimposed formula to calculate value. Fàbriques is a fascinating example of urban architecture, a drift through the factories of the Barcelona area of Poblenou before it underwent radical gentrification. As if in an exercise by Georges Perece, describing the same square over and over, Línia 39 puts forward a videographic panorama to exhaust the gaze in one place: twenty-four hours in the plaza de Rovira i Trias in Barcelona. Moreover, in Indian Circle Eugènia Balcells approaches a similar exercise to early Chantal Akerman in turning the camera into a mechanical eye of domestic intimacy, in stills of life that occur between unalterable movements of the camera.

The third session gathers youth music subcultures from the mid-1980s, a vibrant time for music video language, exploring how music, partying and night-life encapsulate a profound desire for total change, reflected in the formal experiments of the works here. The Basque radical rock of La Polla Records (Juan José Narbona with Txus), Hertzainak (Josu Zabala with Mata a tu viejo) and Kortatu (Tipula Beltza with Sarri, Sarri) with latent terrorist conflict (Ramón de Vargas with Canciones vascas), mixed with the telluric, histrionic Galician punk of Os Resentidos and Antón Reixa in Abdul, a music video with scenography by artists Menchu Lamas and Antón Patiño, and Alicia en Galicia Caníbal, a music video of Galician identity seen through the lens of counterculture via the track “Galicia cannibal”. The session concludes with Andalusian folklore in the witty, night-time style of Círculo Vicioso in Temperamento cañí.

A programme threaded together by the mise en scène, the masquerade, the costume, pastiche and aesthetic saturation. Regina Álvarez, in a pioneering and little-known exercise in the female gaze, studies, via the pose, the construction of femininity in canonical cinema. Antonio Cano and Pedro Garhel, for their part, film a performance for camera developed at ARCO 1985, whereby Garhel and Rosa Galindo dance around post-minimalist sculptures with loud colours. José Ramón Da Cruz develops a psychodrama laden with aestheticism between a dancer and a person with reduced mobility. Finally, El Hortelano, an iconic painter from Madrid’s Movida movement, makes in Koloroa an impossible news bulletin, which, in topsy-turvy Spanish, he presents with Ouka Leele and artists from the time like Ceesepe, Nazario and Jaume Sisa. A method that would inspire Almodóvar in Kika (1993).

— With a presentation by Manuel Palacio, curator of The Sublime Image. Video Art in Spain (1970–1987) and a lecturer in Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the University Carlos III (Madrid), alongside Carlota Álvarez Basso, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Audiovisual Works from 1992 to 1999, and Chema González, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Film and New Media Department.  

A programme on the origins of video linked to happenings, performance and Action Art; in other words, connected to life itself. Primera Muerte (First Death) is the first video art piece made in Spain, a work which disappeared for decades before being finally recovered by curators Imma Prieto and Blanca de la Torre in 2010. After the Barcelona College of Architects asked a group of avant-garde artists made up of Sílvia Gubern, Jordi Galí, Àngel Jové and Antoni Llena to give a lecture, the group decided to record everyday scenes of them living together and subsequently showed them during the lecture on a TV monitor while Àngel Jové read extracts of William S. Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch and the audience was recorded and confronted with their own images while The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” played. Meanwhile, in Subsensorial Actions 1 by Muntadas, the artist, with his eyes covered, experiments with meanings alluding to somatic actions recalling Vito Acconci and Lygia Clark, as well as the existential absurdism of Buster Keaton.

As a recap of the previous sessions, this screening considers a geography of past and present struggles: a refined formal approach, a portrait of popular life, the landscape testimony of working communities and the critique of accumulation and inequality. The monumental diptych Too Early, Too Late (1982) reflects Engels’s sharp analysis of the French Revolution, along with the enumeration of the distribution of taxes on different hamlets in the French countryside. In the second part, the account of Mahmoud Hussein — a pseudonym for Egyptian Marxist historians Bahgat El Nadi and Adel Rifaat — ranges across the memory of anti-imperialist citizen revolts in Egypt throughout the twentieth century. The film destabilises stereotypes and common places of political insurgency in the North African country. Recovering and circulating this latent memory helps to name that which still resists being named and, as Straub y Huillet indicate, “making the revolution is to put very old yet forgotten things back in their place”.  

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. 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.

If cinema does not set out to reach objectivity then each film takes a biased view of observed reality. The session begins with the seemingly neutral view of Cao Guimarães to observe a boy and girl playing in the rain in Da Janela do Meu Cuarto (From the Window of My Room, 2004). A work, deceptively relaxed, which prefigures one of the session’s constants: the place of childhood as a project of worlds to come. The boundless urban vitality of Barcelona Joan Colom portrays in El carrer (The Street, 1960) comes face to face with the extraordinary Niños (Children, 1974), by the Grupo de Cine Liberación sin Rodeos, a multi-voiced depiction of a group of friends in Cuzco whose citizen-focused schooling co-exists, just, with their daily work and reveals the limitations of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in Peru. Visión de la selva (View of the Jungle, 1973), by the same Peruvian collective, puts forward another model of representation and intervention on the public sphere with direct news activism, which denounces the plundering of the Amazon by multi-national companies. 

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. 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.

Time, light, vision. What is an image? How does an image make us see the world? First, hypnosis, a reset: Paulino Viota’s Duración (Duration, 1970), the portrait of a clock face over sixty seconds. Next, a window into a slightly altered reality: Javier Aguirre’s Objetivo 40º (40 Degree Lens, 1968–1970). A minimum intervention that inspires a session considered as successive immersions in blocks of time, as well as a journey that starts from the intimacy of a candle, the movement of a car around abandoned peripheries and the traces of anti-Franco protestors, with night falling to the emotive, profound and sharp voice of Ocaña. Now in 1990, the journey ends at other street protests, those articulated by the Agustín Parejo School collective owing to the housing problem in Málaga. As Javier Aguirre states: “It is not about achieving the objective. It is about demystifying it”.     

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. 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.   

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?