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Monday, 13 September 2021 – 5:30pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium and Online platform
Session 1. Ethnocide
Second session: Monday, 20 September 2021 – 5:30pm
TicketsMarta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva. Planas: The Contradictions of Capitalism. A Testimony of Ethnocide
Colombia, 1971, b/w, original version, 16mm transferred to DA, 37’. Spanish premiere of the version restored by the Documentary Cinema Foundation, with the support of Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. (Not available in second session, accessible from September 23 to 29 on the online platform)Paul Leduc. Ethnocide. Notes About the Region of Mezquital
Canada and Mexico, 1977, b/w, original version in Spanish, 16mm transferred to DA, 130'Two striking historical documentaries from New Latin American Cinema and the history of the medium. Both entwine the aesthetic avant-garde with politics in protest film-making that also reformulates documentary language. In Planas: The Contradictions of Capitalism. A Testimony of Ethnocide, Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva recount, in an assemblage melding cinéma vérité and archive images, the landowner-backed persecution of the Sikuani community by the Colombian army in the Llanos Orientales (Orinoquía) region. Justified as the elimination of a guerrilla group, the intervention sought to put an end to an indigenous cooperative that avoided the intensive exploitation of the area by estate owners. On the other side, in Ethnocide. Notes About the Region of Mezquital Paul Leduc synthesises structural vision and social commitment as he sketches the cultural extermination of the Otomi community in the Mexican state of Hidalgo via an abecedarium of violence: A for antecedents, B for bourgeois, C for class, D for democracy… Up to 18 chapters that articulate a glossary of exploitation uttered solely by the voices of the Otomi minority, and with a script and research by anthropologist Roger Bartra.
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Wednesday, 15 September 2021 – 6pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Rituals. Indigenous Artists
Second session: Wednesday, 22 September 2021 – 6pm
TicketsIsael and Sueli Maxacali. Yãmîy
Brazil, 2012, colour, original version in Maxacali with Spanish subtitles, DA, 15'Tawna. Film From Territory. Tuku
Ecuador, 2021, colour, original version in Quechua with Spanish subtitles, DA, 12'Charles Fairbanks and Saúl Kak. Echoes of the Volcano
Mexico, 2020, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 18'Francisco Huichaqueo. Kuifi ül. Ancient Sound
Chile, 2020, colour, sound, DA, 10’Francisco Huichaqueo and Leonel Lienlaf. Kuzen. Full Moon Songs
Chile, 2016, colour, original version in Mapudungun, DA, 4’―The first session will be presented by Sara Buraya (Museo Reina Sofía) and Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona (Institute of Radical Imagination), and followed by a talk between artist Francisco Huichaqueo, a participant in this film series and the exhibition We Are Fragments of Light that Prevent Everything Becoming Night, Natalia Arcos (curator of the show), Chema González (Museo Reina Sofía) and Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona (Institute of Radical Imagination).
This collective session features film-makers and contemporary indigenous artists who use film as a key medium to represent indigenous peoples’ cosmovision. They all share the search for an audiovisual language adapted to ritual understood as a paradigm for an indigenous identity that bears a close relation to their community and nature. Isael and Sueli Maxacali, from the Maxacali community of Minas Gerais (Brazil), film a collective theatre in their own village, in which their people metamorphose into yamiys, spirits of the Maxacali cemetery that mutate into different animate and inanimate beings. Tawna. Cine desde territorio (Tawna. Film from Territory) is a collective that develops audiovisual projects with the aim of decolonising gazes and narrations from Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, thereby proposing that vernacular stories be told and filmed from the place inhabited and defended by the same autochthonous people in a committed exercise of self-representation. In Tuku, some children look for a worm as they hear a tale about the healing powers attributed to these invertebrates. Elsewhere, Saúl Kak, from the indigenous Zoque people, in collaboration with North American film-maker Charles Fairbanks, explores the mass displacement of the Zoque population after the eruption of the Chichonal volcano in Mexico. It also recounts how this same community has sought refuge in a place where Chiapas oral culture shapes their daily life through ever-present loudspeakers located around the whole village, random technology combining monument, totem and village resident. Finally, Mapuche Francisco Huichaqueo calls for the Mapuche community, hounded in Chile, to express itself through dreams, poetry and hallucination. In Kuifi ül. Ancient Sound the ancestral instrument the trutruka characterises the ceremony of Wüñoy tripantu, the Mapuche New Year, while in Kuzen. Full Moon Songs a poem by Mapuche writer and musician Leonel Lienlaf sets the rhythm of time.
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Friday, 17 September 2021 – 5pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. Weavers. The First Workshop of Indigenous Film
Second session: Thursday, 23 September 2021 – 6pm
TicketsElvira Palafox Herranz. Teat Monteok, The Tale of the God of Lightning
Mexico, 1985–2018, colour, original version in Huave with Spanish subtitles, Super-8 transferred to DA, 19'. Courtesy of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), Mexico.Elvira Palafox Herranz. Angoch Tanomb (An Ancient Wedding)
Mexico, 1985–2018, colour, original version in Huave with Spanish subtitles, Super-8 transferred to DA, 11'. Courtesy of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), Mexico.Teófila Palafox Herranz. Leaw amangoch tinden nop ikoods (The Life of an Ikoots Family)
Mexico, 1987–2018, colour, original version in Huave with Spanish subtitles, Super-8 transferred to DA, 22'. Courtesy of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), Mexico.Three unreleased documentaries in Spain, two of which, The Tale of the God of Lightening and An Ancient Wedding, with postproduction between 2012–2013, are shown publicly for the first time in 2021. The films denote a tipping point in indigenous cinema and entail the self-representation of a group of Huave women after The First Workshop of Indigenous Film, made in San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, Mexico) in 1985. The workshop looked to scrap the official policies that had dominated the relationship between the Mexican state and the indigenous subject between 1930 and 1980; policies characterised by the search for a modern mixed-race citizen and by the assimilation of the Indian’s cultural difference. Therefore, a group of film-makers and researchers — Alberto Becerril, Luis Lupone and Carlos Mendoza — following the teachings of Jean Rouch and postmodern anthropology, which questions the authority of the ethnographer and the objectivity of the document, develop a workshop allowing the community to recount their stories and produce their own audiovisual memory. The women chosen, sisters Elvira and Teófila Palafox, were weavers who would regularly use highly complex storied motifs, facilitating their capacity for narration and visual description. Shot in Super-8, the films are regarded as forerunners of video and more contemporary indigenous audiovisual works. The Life of an Ikoots Family reflects daily experience, away from ritual. Teat Monteok, The Tale of the God of Lightning narrates a story of the Huave cosmovision on the origin of their people with a sophisticated montage combining fiction (story) and document (work). Finally, An Ancient Wedding evades folkloric costumbrismo by using a huge temporal jump as a narrative resource.
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Saturday, 18 September 2021 – 12pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. Stories. Children’s Programme
Second session: Saturday, 25 September 2021 – 12pm
TicketsGabriela Badillo. The Origin of the Sun and Moon
Mexico, 2017, colour, original version in Tseltal with Spanish subtitles, DA, 1'20''Jackson Abacatu, Charles Bicalho and Isael Maxacali. Konāgxeka. The Maxakali Flood
Brazil, 2016, colour, original version in Maxacali with Spanish subtitles, DA, 16'Gabriela Badillo. The Origin of the Rainbow
Mexico, 2017, colour, original version in Mazateco with Spanish subtitles, DA, 1'20''Jackson Abacatu, Charles Bicalho and Shawara Maxacali. Mātanāg. The Enchanted Lady
Brazil, 2020, colour, original version in Maxacali with Spanish subtitles, DA, 14'Gabriela Badillo. The Wild Animal that Didn’t Want to Get Dirty
Mexico, 2017, colour, original version in Tepehua with Spanish subtitles, DA, 1'20''Aldana Loiseau. Pacha, We Are Clay. Pacha and Souls
Argentina, 2019, colour, sound, DA, 5’20’’Antonio Coello.Hant Quij Cöipaxi Hac (The Creation of the World)
Mexico, 2019, colour, original version in Seri with Spanish subtitles, DA, 10'―Featuring enlivening participation in both sessions by La Parcería Infancia y Familia, a collective of thought, creation and action in the production of artistic and cultural projects.
― The session on 18 September will be recorded for educational purposes and to disseminate the activity. Those in attendance will be given a consent form for the transfer of image rights, to be signed voluntarily.This session devoted to child and family audiences is made up of short animated films made in collaboration or joint authorship with different indigenous communities from Latin America. The pieces are shot in their original language, and will be brought to life by the cultural association La Parcería Infancia y Familia, which will work alongside artists and poets Lilián Pallares and Charles Olsen on a series of playful-poetic actions to accompany and connect with, through children’s gazes, this journey to see, listen and broaden our own sense of the world towards the roots of the thousand-year cultural reality of indigenous peoples. The common thread of the different short films is the passing-on of the idea of identity and memory through minority languages, and the interpretation of stories from oral tradition about the origin of the world and life. The Origin of the Sun and Moon, The Origin of the Rainbow and The Wild Animal that Didn’t Want to Get Dirty belong to the famed Mexican series 68 voces, 68 corazones (68 Voices, 68 Hearts), which compiles 68 languages from Mexico by way of 68 indigenous stories recorded in their own languages. Konāgxeka. The Maxakali Flood explores the myth of flooding as a punishment for selfishness and human greed, a belief of the Maxacali ethnic group from Minas Gerais (Brazil), with the illustrations made in a workshop by these indigenous people. Mātanāg. The Enchanted Lady is another example of Maxacali sung cinema and narrates the connection between the afterlife and the world of the living through the journey between both kingdoms of the Maxacali protagonist Mātanāg. In Pacha, We Are Clay. Pacha and Souls, Aldana Loiseau uses clay to tell a story about the relationship between life and earth, and finally, The Creation of the World stems from a collaboration between its author, Antonio Coello, and elderly women and girls of the Seri people (a community from the Mexican state of Sonora), leading to an investigation of oral stories, vernacular songs and cave paintings. The result is a beautiful Seri version of the birth of the world.
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Saturday, 18 September 2021 – 6pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 5. The Spokeswoman
Second session: Saturday, 25 September 2021 – 6pm
TicketsLuciana Kaplan. The Spokeswoman
Mexico, 2020, colour, original version in Spanish, DA, 82'―Presentation and talk with the film crew in the first session.
This session devoted to child and family audiences is made up of short animated films made in collaboration or joint authorship with different indigenous communities from Latin America. The pieces are filmed in their original language and are brought to life by the cultural association La Parcería. The common thread of the different short films is the passing-on of the idea of identity and memory through minority languages, and the interpretation of stories from oral tradition about the origin of the world and life. The Origin of the Sun and Moon, The Origin of the Rainbow and The Wild Animal that Didn’t Want to Get Dirty belong to the famed Mexican series 68 voces, 68 corazones (68 Voices, 68 Hearts), which compiles 68 languages from Mexico by way of 68 indigenous stories recorded in their own languages. Konāgxeka. The Maxakali Flood explores the myth of flooding as a punishment for selfishness and human greed, a belief of the Maxacali ethnic group from Minas Gerais (Brazil), with the illustrations made in a workshop by these indigenous people. Mātanāg. The Enchanted Lady is another example of Maxacali sung cinema and narrates the connection between the afterlife and the world of the living through the journey between both kingdoms of the Maxacali protagonist Mātanāg. In Pacha, We Are Clay. Pacha and Souls, Aldana Loiseau uses clay to tell a story about the relationship between life and earth, and finally, The Creation of the World stems from a collaboration between its author, Antonio Coello, and elderly women and girls of the Seri people (a community from the Mexican state of Sonora), leading to an investigation of oral stories, vernacular songs and cave paintings. The result is a beautiful Seri version of the birth of the world.
Held on 13 Sep 2021
A quote from the fourth Zapatista Manifesto of 1996 lends this audiovisual programme its title. With longing and poetry, the phrase captures the desire for change in the wake of prolonged repression, whereby the lives of indigenous communities in Latin America cast light on a society that is more just, equal, diverse and respectful to nature. Film, the modern device emanating from the industrial revolution, radically transforms through the indigenous gaze and use. Life as ritual, cyclical time, the indistinctness between myth and reality, and the veneration of territory mix with guerrilla resistance and global communication technologies, altering and shaking up ways of imagining and storytelling. This series, therefore, brings together all these aspirations and transformations over five sessions.
But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others. Film and Indigenous Lives encompasses a broad chronological arc that spans from 1970 to 2020, from the indiscriminate massacre known in Latin America as ethnocide to the Zapatista delegation’s recent journey from the Chiapas jungle to Europe’s major cities; a journey which seeks to rediscover models of co-existence and good living for a worn-out West. In a synthesis of environmentalism, community organisation, ancestral cosmovision and a recognition of difference, indigenous societies give prominence to a future outside the principles of land extraction and wealth accumulation that have characterised global capitalism across recent centuries.
The series gets under way with the session Ethnocide, which includes historical documentaries by Paul Leduc, on one side, and Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, on the other. With ties to Third Cinema, they show, for the first time, the destruction and mass displacement of the indigenous population under the imperative of modernisation, while reflecting on the most suitable way of zooming in on, via documentary film, a widely under-represented collective. The next two sessions screen films made by the indigenous community, including artists and film-makers, who call for an autochthonous visual tradition and generate their own imagery, which is at variance with the anthropological or ethnographic approaches that have condemned them to being a filmed other. The programme moves on to Stories, a session aimed at child and family audiences and made up of a selection of short animated films on the stories of different indigenous communities on the origin of the world. Finally, it wraps up with the Spanish premiere of the feature-length film La vocera (The Spokeswoman), which centres on the candidacy for the Mexican Presidency by María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, “Marichuy”, a woman from the Nahua indigenous community and a spokesperson for the National Indigenous Congress; a candidacy that exposed a crack in the traditional political system and was viewed as a lesson in democracy by indigenous communities.
Curated by
Chema González, in collaboration with Natalia Arcos and Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI)
Collaboration
Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI) and L’Internationale
Acknowledgements
Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE) and Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (INPI)
In the framework of
Inside the framework of
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.