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
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
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?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.