The Monster of Work

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the idea of the monstrous.

This final session is centred on High Roads (Giuliana Racco, 2022), a film which displaces the gaze, shifting it from the major accounts of genocide in Palestine towards daily forms of resistance. By way of four Palestinian women who play sport, breathe, and practice other bodily disciplines in a context marked by Israeli military occupation, the film shows how care, persistence and community-building can become political practices. High Roads, therefore, connects with the idea of the “magic yes” via the decision to keep on producing well-being, movement and ties in conditions that conspire against it. It also puts forward a form of decentralisation: resistance appears not in institutions or official discourses, but in bodies, affects and shared gestures.

The session unfolds through films that practise ways of deviating from the institutional axis and activate other modes of looking, playing, resisting and organising collectively. Through masks, altered rules, corporeal fictions and daily practices of care, the pieces work with situations where an acceptance of the improbable or the strange is a kind of “magic yes”: a gesture which allows something to be displaced and transformed within a context of hegemony.

The museum thus no longer appears as a fixed place from which to order culture, becoming instead a space traversed by other rules, temporalities and ways of inhabiting the commons. The films assembled in the session displace the gaze towards what normally remains outside: peripheral territories, hybrid practices and clumsy gestures which, however, are full of intent or forms of organisation distanced from dominant codes. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, the rough, the precarious and the strange appear here as legitimate forms of making and showing culture.

The idea is less about affirming a new centrality than opening a question about what happens when central authority is destabilised and other sensibilities, bodies and imaginaries enter the stage. Films that, rather than offering closed responses and looking for consensus, experiment with different ways of inhabiting the museum and producing common space. 

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.

The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts.  Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live. 

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.

Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.   

Building on the idea of “the monster of work”, EquipoMotor opens up a dialogue on how the museum might become “a little more Frankenstein” by addressing the material conditions that reproduce, among other things, situations such as those reflected in Get into The Zone, the piece selected by the intergenerational group. The session seeks to continue inhabiting friction, to raise uncomfortable questions and to refine the language with which to imagine futures in which workplace malaise is not silenced but organised.

Get into The Zone is a video essay by Juan David Galindo that explores states of intensive concentration associated with work and leisure in digital environments. The title draws on an expression used in programming to describe a state of productive hyperfocus, linking this condition to contemporary diagnoses and forms of distress such as ADHD, burnout syndrome, anxiety, depression and hyperstimulation.

Galindo’s proposed trajectory combines narrative and conceptual elements. It connects the use of stimulants — from amphetamine-derived pharmaceuticals to coffee, tea, yerba mate and taurine-based drinks — with the economic and cultural history of these substances. It also relates these practices to screen-based work dynamics, video games, electronic music and forms of leisure shaped by continuous stimulation. The author’s personal experience functions here as a guiding thread, situating these processes within a broader social and historical framework.

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 first session explores freakiness as methodology, a way to approach film and museum from experimentation, anomaly and deviation from established canons. Film is understood as a space of essay, where images, sounds and narratives move out of place to open other forms of critical reading, question norms and place the established under strain. This is the framework in which the group agrees to begin from dissent and formulate an initial question: Which monsters already inhabit the institution? 

Buenos días España shows how the Brotherhood of Ancient Legionary Knights of Barcelona repeatedly carry out their rituals and military codes of conduct every Sunday, demonstrating how these practices keep far-right ideologies alive. The piece triggers a kind of gaze and tension that interests this group and steers the conversation towards how the abject can inhabit apparent normality.