Present Time: Insurgent Images

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.

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.

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.   

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.