The Monstrous Screen

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.

Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.   

The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.

The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.

In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art. 

Inside the framework of the conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge, this film series sets forth three critical visions of the museum via three sessions featuring the works of John Berger, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ariella Azoulay, Alan Resnais and Chris Marker, Kwate Nee-Owoo, and the premiere of short films by Isabel Coixet and La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado). In classical theory, the museum gives the world meaning; it contains fragments of the past, granting them a history, a narrative that explains preterite time and the present. Today, there is an implicit assumption that this function hides and legitimises forms of power, yet what if the museum, instead of explaining the world, multiplied it through radical ideas, silenced periods and repressed subjects?  Such is the approach of the film-makers and artists in this film season. 

In 1972 the writer John Berger opened the landmark television series Ways of Seeing with an iconoclastic gesture: slicing Sandro Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars (1485) in London’s National Gallery. A transgressive act that recalls contemporary attacks on the museum by dissident youth and with which Berger, after revealing it was a reproduction, sought to ignite debate around the idea of an original artwork and a copy. In this, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first session pays homage to one of the great art writers of the twentieth century. Starting with a review of Berger’s audiovisual work by art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola, the series begins with the premiere of 100 Years and You Everywhere (2026), an unreleased short film by Isabel Coixet composed as a beautifully crafted letter to Berger, and continues with an analysis of fragments of Ways of Seeing in relation to the museum and contemporary art. 

The second session screens two medium-length films by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville on time, ruin and museum. In The Old Place. Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century (1999), both film-makers consider what remains of that “old place”, the museum, at the close of a century of wars and totalitarianism, and ask whether it should be more of a legend or desire than a place. This same driving principle leads Godard to build his own imaginary museum in Reportage amateur (maquette expo) (2006), a rickety toy museum which, paradoxically, contains the great film-maker’s full power of thought on history and images. 

Finally, the third session explores one of the major challenges of recent years: the decolonisation of the museum, the recognition of its link to imperialist discourses of power and the need to situate a new silenced or repressed subject at the centre of the Western narration of history. Under the title Museums and Restitution, it includes the film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), by theorist Ariella Azoulay, Statues Also Die, by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker (1953), Kwate Nee-Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and the first screening of the short film Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), by La Vulcanizadora (Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado), filmed at the Museo de América in Madrid. 

Centuries of plundering, decades of amnesia, years of living with unmitigated extractivist power… Does a museum, as we know it, have a raison d'être in a postcolonial society?

This session expounds the operations of the museum as a colonial machine, while putting forward ideas, in narration, for a more just, equal and inclusive institution of the future via society’s marginalised and minority voices. The session begins with the international premiere of Quinto verso, parte de Tonada (Fifth Verse, Part of Tonada), which presents a vision of the Quimbaya Collection (fifth and sixth centuries CE) from the Museo de América in Madrid. It is constructed with the voices and chants of Wayúu mourners and guides, not only as a way of reinstating the role of these gold idols — anthropomorphic figures of men and women used as vessels in ritual practices — but also to imagine that what must be exhibited is not the gold itself. It is the ritual’s own chant. In the classic film You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian film-maker Kwate Nee-Owoo accesses the British Museum’s collection of African art, located in the building’s basement, to question the meaning behind a museum plundering and nullifying. A fine exercise of first-person institutional critique screened for the first time in Spain. Almost seventy years since Resnais and Marker made Statues Also Die (1953), a reflection on the aura-bearing value of the museum opposite the identity-based and cultural belonging of African art, theorist Ariella Azoulay films the same statues again at the Musée du Trocadéro (today the Musée du Quai Branly), which survive and wait to be reunited with their people. Azoulay, whose wholly original undertaking is a lesson to the museum of the future, connects the forced migration of these sculptures with the mass transit of people crossing borders artificially imposed by the same system that has plundered their culture.