Held on 26 Feb 2021
The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites film-maker, poet and writer Margarita Ledo (Castro de Rei, Lugo, 1951) to take part in its programme of master lectures. Exiled in Portugal at the end of Franco’s dictatorship after being persecuted for her affiliation with the Unión do Povo Galego, Margarita Ledo is today a member of the Real Academia Galega and a lecturer in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her filmography is a unique utterance in auteur cinema by virtue of its ongoing shaping of recurrent themes that take root in the search for an ever greater formal complexity. Noteworthy among these themes is the emphasis she places on recovering migrant women’s voices and their accounts marked by diaspora and exile.
This edition of the Chair, comprising a master lecture, sees Margarita Ledo set forth a reflection on the body as a remnant, as a point of arrival after tracing an invisible thread that extends across film based on memory, anti-establishment practices, the marginalisation of women in public spaces, the estrangement of their own bodies and the power of essay films as an artistic practice.
To present and initiate the debate, we recount these words by the film-maker:
“The different writings of ‘I’ with the body as an artefact, as an archive of remnants and interferences, as a subject of desire, as a place to make film, distinguish one from another, for in each of its fragments resides a footprint in which this elemental unease entailing the production of an image and gaze is inscribed. Therefore, somehow or other in each work these ‘knocks behind the door’ reverberate and normally lie dormant in notes, ledgers, and situations we reminisce about and bring into our hands these creators of unreconciled attitude, which, intellectually and personally, passed through the night, exposing, close-up, their existence; they made film an experience for whoever gazes.
To travel through the folds, the line of shadow in which variations of this different gaze are strung together, that female gaze feminist studies pursue and which expands beyond works made by women, that is our commitment with female and male artists that, in terms of thought — from Benjamin to Stuart Hall — are still strong, with those practices that, from the material history of culture, take up a position that chimes with Adrienne Rich and her reflections in her seminal essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ (1985) or with a present generation in which a work with a phenomenological flavour such as Iris Brey’s Le regard féminin (2020) is a joyous symptom that stretches to women artists who reach the world of performance to transit the darkness, anchoring themselves in the canonical incorporation of patriarchal images and the decision to resignify them.
In its double perception — which starts at that moment of grace tying you to a determined sequence of a journey towards the production of that ‘other’ image and continues in that of the person gazing — the body becomes an utterance against fetishization. It is a journey in which a reverberating multiple object formalises in the flow of thought around lived experience, in the ‘dark feelings’ around certain episodes which perhaps must remain in the dark, unrevealed, and which Chantal Akerman offers us in Ma mère rit. Traits et portraits (2013). Although, ad-libbing, sometimes it is important to look for the truth, because when it is there we feel it in books and in films, Akerman tells herself. We feel there is something ‘happening underground, slowly, sometimes very slowly; when you don’t even think about it, the truth appears and comes about at an extraordinary moment that does not come every day; a good moment, so good that suddenly we feel calm and light’.
This dark truth was exile and annihilation, something hard to name. It was the marginalisation of women in public space, the estrangement of their own bodies. It is the century’s inner-history. Yet from darkness the essay film emerges on the screen as a landscape, as an artistic practice, as an encounter between flesh and body. And that latent, dark truth takes on meaning. As in 1928, while Walter Benjamin interviewed André Gide in Berlin. At one point the writer quotes the admiral de Bougainville: ‘When we left the island we gave it the name Salvador Island’. And Benjamin remarks that then, and precisely then, Gide adds that chilling phrase: ‘Ce n’est qu’en quittant une chose que nous la nommons’ (Only when we abandon something do we give it a name). At that moment the narrative begins. Memory is now raw material for a work that perhaps is useful to us to fill the gaps. Fractures in the historical process. Fears”.
Margarita Ledo, February 2021
Margarita Ledo Andión is a film-maker, writer, teacher and researcher. She also lectures in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela and is director of the Audiovisual Studies Group at the same university. Her studies around the politics of representation in photographic and filmic documentary imagery are reflected in works such as
Del Cine Ojo a Dogma 95 (Paidós, 2004) and Cine de fotógrafos (Gustavo Gili, 2005), while her films most notably include the documentary Santa Liberdade (2004), Liste, pronunciado Líster (2007) and A cicatriz branca (2012). In 2008 she received the National Award for Galician Culture in the category of film and audiovisuals and since then has been a numerary member of the Real Academia Galega.
Education programme developed with the sponsorship of the
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair
Collaboration
The MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture organized by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), and the Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Fundación Banco Santander
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.