Mirar de cerca. De visu
Held on 23, 23 Oct 2025
De visu is a series of public sessions in which some of the most recent acquisitions of the Museum’s Library are presented, with the aim of enriching its collections. These sessions not only foster a deeper understanding of the works presented and their relevance within the current context of art and culture, but also serve as a meeting point for those interested in publishing as an artistic practice.
The activity consists of a brief introduction to each of the selected books or documents, allowing participants to become familiar with different authors, publishers, and the contexts in which these works were created. Attendees have the opportunity to browse the materials, ask questions, and take part in the discussion.
On this occasion, the session focuses on books, publications, and printed materials from Central America, and is led by Salvadoran artist, curator, and professor Patricio Majano, a 2025 resident researcher at the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), the organization dedicated to the study, research, and dissemination of the practices, scenes, and histories of Central American art and its diasporas, housed at the Museo Reina Sofía.
This project takes place within the framework of A Closer Look, one of the strands that shape the mediation program Almost Books, focused on showcasing the Museum Library’s collections and disseminating specialized tools for research in art and contemporary creative practices through workshops, courses, and thematic guides.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and ICAC
Participants
Patricio Majano is a Salvadoran curator. His work focuses on artistic practices developed in Central America and its diasporas, particularly in relation to the region’s political urgencies. He is also curator and Head of Programming at Y.ES Contemporary, a pioneering platform for the promotion of contemporary art in El Salvador and the main predecessor of the ICAC. He has also been a professor at the School of Arts of the University of El Salvador and has collaborated on the educational programs of the Museum of Art of El Salvador and Museo Forma in San Salvador.
Más actividades
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
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.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
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.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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.