On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
Cinema Commons #1
Red Horse, Red Horse’s depiction of the destruction of Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1881
Graphite, coloured in pencil and ink
Held on 23, 24, 25, 30, 31 oct 2025
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
Inside the framework of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 23 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 1. Lecture by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
—Encounter with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros to discuss the CSOA La Morada film society and the Lavapiés Film Festival.
viernes 24 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 2. John Ford. Fort Apache
USA, 1948, black and white, 35mm, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 127’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
Men who are not afraid of dying are often afraid of living. The soldiers in Fort Apache ward off this fear with dancing, jokes and drink. Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, assigned to be in command of these soldiers, averts this fear by living for posterity; that is, for death. He gives orders, and they obey, for “the uniform is not a subject for individual expression”. The newspaper headlines he dreams of come to declare war on another people. The Apaches perhaps could have shown the border outpost community what a stateless people can look like, yet the possibility of founding something new is reached by the past, by European civilisation, by Boston civilisation. Thursday lets his wrath rain down with overwhelming force and Ford, a realist film-maker and here with his version of the Battle of Little Bighorn, conveys at once the facts and the legend.
sábado 25 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 3. John Gianvito. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
USA, 2001, colour, DA, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 168’
—With a presentation by and conversation with Miriam Martín and Ana Useros
A woman who takes the surname Hussein by marriage, a teenager, and a former soldier are the three characters whom the Gulf War removes from their homes and turns them into nomadic figures. Set on the frontier, like Fort Apache, the film begins with the bodies of two children floating on Río Grande. As with Ford’s supporting roles, we soon encounter them fleetingly but with intensity, enough for their deaths to matter. By the 1990s, the enemy had shifted from Indians to Arabs. The here of fiction mixes with the there of documentary; fiction in the USA wraps and preserves the records of Iraq: a musical composition on the bombing of the al-Amiriyah shelter, photos of the “highway of death” that nobody wanted to publish. The roaming figures wander and beauty and terror occur, yet no feeling is definitive.
jueves 30 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 2 (second screening). John Ford. Fort Apache
USA, 1948, black and white, 35mm, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 127’
viernes 31 oct 2025 a las 19:00
Session 3 (second screening). John Gianvito. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
USA, 2001, colour, DA, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 168’
Participants
Miriam Martín has devoted her whole adult life to film, and part of her pre-adult life. First as a viewer, then as a film curator at different institutions. For just shy of six years, she organised the Chantal film society, an aesthetic and political experience organised weekly. In 2019, she made the film La espada me la ha Regalado, and in 2023 premiered Vuelta a Riaño.
Ana Useros is a translator and activist who has been part of the organising assembly of the Lavapiés Film Festival for seventeen years.
Actividad dentro de la programación...
Cinema Commons
Cinema Commons is a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film and sound experiences articulate interpretive communities, fostering collective debate and devising proposals for common spaces. Constructed in two annual editions, this year it will explore three core strands: the alternative film society as a place of utopia and resistance, with film curators Miriam Martín and Ana Useros; the work of artist Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir, a learning collective focused on African diaspora and inspired by the trailblazing Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène; and the union between activism and celluloid, machine and poetry, in the L’Abominable Laboratory, located on the outskirts of Paris.
The project addresses processes of socialisation and film’s potential beyond the image, with this edition bringing together different practices which explore film’s capacity to assemble and produce common spaces, understood in architectural, social and political terms. Film has always been a decisive tool in struggles for emancipation and, setting out from this genealogy, the proposals in this edition look to understand the role it can play in today’s cultural and political context, overcoming the dominant forms of representation and its modes of distribution to advance towards an ethics of life in common.
Ver programa
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
This second instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common space, comprises three sessions with Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker Christian Nyampeta and Ècole du soir. The programme’s first session screens video works made by Nyampeta, while the second sets forth a dialogue on the creative processes of Ècole du soir. The third brings proceedings to a close with the screening of a film selected by the artist: Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992).
The work of Christian Nyampeta encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
The New York-based artist from Rwanda uses art and museums to create spaces of encounter and common learning that predate colonial education models. Via popular culture frames of reference like comics, music and film, Nyampeta develops dynamics and spaces from which to build experiences which redress the wounds of diaspora and its consequences; further, his work recovers, makes visible and heals — through a pedagogical and artistic process — the social divides of the African people. With Ècole du soir he also works on creations without authorship and uses the counter-ethnographic legacy of novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembène as a tool to deconstruct the Western view of Africa.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
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.
Fifteenth Edition of the Márgenes Festival
Sunday, 23 November 2025 - 7:30pm
This year’s opening night of the fifteenth edition of the Márgenes International Contemporary Film Festival will take place inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The inaugural session will witness artists Neutro Gris and Nodoaviom perform, live and for the first time, the multimedia performance Music 4 Salvation, which extends their language towards a sensorial experience fusing sound, image and digital emotion.
Music 4 Salvation unfolds as a sound and visual collage in which different strands are linked in one sole narrative of youth and adulthood, notions from which the piece puts forward a second reading of popular symbology and iconography and culminates by evoking the transitional time between these two stages of life. And all from a post-internet gaze and found footage aesthetics.
The Márgenes Festival is held from 23 to 30 November in Madrid and shines a light on innovative initiatives that combine up-and-coming and acclaimed talent. Its film programme explores the convergence of cinema, the visual arts and sound art with approaches that expand the limits of the film experience, encompassing screenings, audiovisual shows, performances, encounters and sessions for children. In addition to the opening event, the Museo also welcomes, among the organised activities this year, the series Emotional Interface. The Films of Metahaven.
The Films of Ira Sachs
From Thursday, 20, to Sunday, 23 November 2025 – Check times
The International Festival of LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Madrid (QueerCineMad) and the Museo Reina Sofía come together to organise a retrospective on Ira Sachs (USA, 1965), a pivotal film-maker in contemporary queer cinema whose work has charted, across three decades, the affects, losses and resistance that traverse the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sachs is the creator of a filmography which conceives of New York as the emotional architecture of his narratives, and as a space of memory, struggle and community. This programme includes the premiere of his most recent film, Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), in Madrid, with the film-maker in attendance in three of its sessions.
Sachs has filmed, with delicacy and conviction, the tensions between desire, precarity and belonging, from his first feature-length film, The Delta (1996), set on the margins of the Mississippi, to Love Is Strange (2014), where a gay couple have to give up their Manhattan apartment after marrying. In Keep the Lights On (2012) intimacy becomes a battleground in confronting addiction and neglect, while Lady (1994), a short film on the solitude of an elderly woman in New York, anticipates his sensibility for bodies made invisible. Last Address (2010) is a silent homage to queer artists who died from AIDS/HIV-related illnesses — Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz — whereby the façades of the buildings they lived in become intimate monuments, the remnants of history erased through windows. Thus, Ira Sachs’s body of work engages in a profound dialogue with film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder in situating the gaze at the centre of bodies, in exploring the complexity of the struggle between himself and his films. Further, his practice reverberates through New Queer Cinema, a 1990s film movement that transformed the representation of sexuality from difference.
The director’s presence in Madrid, coupled with the premiere of his new work, makes this film season an event which extols both his career and his form of gazing and inhabiting the city from the queer, the community and the poetic. In these times of eviction and urban homogenisation, Sachs’s film-making reminds us that the neighbourhood can also be a gesture of care, a form of resistance, a future promise.
The History and Roots of Samba
Saturday, 22 November 2025 – 6pm
Museo Situado and the Maloka Brazilian Cultural Association come together to offer this artistic, historical and social activity in conjunction with Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, which pays homage to Dandara and Zumbi dos Palmares, universal symbols of Afro-Brazilian resistance and the fight against slavery.
In the activity, dance, poetry and performance become tools of memory and resistance via a programme which surveys the history of samba, from its origins in Bahia to its consolidation in Rio de Janeiro. It features the participation of more than ten Brazilian artists and pays homage to key figures in samba such as Tia Ciata, Clementina de Jesús, Cartola, Dona Ivone Lara, Elza Soares, Martinho da Vila and Alcione.
Further, the event seeks to shine a light on the richness of Afro-Brazilian culture while opening a space of reflection on resistance to racism throughout history and today, as well as inequality and disregard. In the words of philosopher Sueli Carneiro (2000), “the fight for the rights of black women and the community of African descent is inseparable from the rescue of history and the memory of our ancestors”. It is an artistic and vindicatory celebration that invites the whole community to aquilombarse: to come together, celebrate and affirm collective memory, for, as sociologist Florestan Fernandes (1976) affirmed, “the history of peoples of African descent can only be understood through the active resistance to oppression”. Long live Dandara. Long live Zumbi. Long live Afro-Brazilian ancestry.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), features the participation of the Casa de Velázquez and is framed inside the context of the CALC programme The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), co-directed by Virginie Giuliana. It is also the outcome of the projects Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area, CA19119) and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences, CA24160).