Schedule and Activities

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Curator: Hila Peleg  – The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years

between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the

syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.

Conceived by Marina Fokidis and curated by Pedro G. Romero, this daily live sound interventions’ program is comprised of live performances meant to be heard through the announcement loudspeakers of ARCOmadrid so as to briefly interrupt all transactions and actions and to create a collective (listening) moment.

The pregón is a popular form of public communication. Its origins lie in the historical ways of announcing administrative or liturgical orders. The Flamenco pregón, comes from an old Mediterranean tradition, and is essentially commercial. It was used to sell peaches, grapes, wine, seafood, etc. It is still striking, to hear these voices hawking the merchandise in the popular markets. At the same time, in the markets of northern Africa and the middle east, where Islam is the predominant religion, we often hear the call to prayer on loudspeakers. These calls may sometimes sound like a pregón to us. In fact, Walter Benjamin says that capitalism operates as a kind of religion. Museums are both the major shopping malls and the cathedrals where the new cult is celebrated. Art fairs have a flea market element to them, reminiscent of the traveling market or the big bazaar. All of this just to set the context. Artists are free to interpret it. We simply propose them as a voice for these living coins that we essentially are. In their performances there is a critical dimension of the ever-overrated ‘money,’ the measure of all things. Pawed, in our pockets, displayed through our fingers like rings, hanging around our necks, in our bags below our armpits or close to our hearts, in tour wallets, stuck to our asses, there is a material view of money that clashes with the spirituality of financial capitalism. P.G.R.

Moderator: Gloria Moure

Participants: Beatrice Bulgari, Javier Molins

“Los guardianes del arte”
Conversaciones con los grandes coleccionistas

Participants: Dani Levinas, Ianko López

Moderator: Omar López-Chahoud

Participants: Carla Acevedo, Mario Cader-Frech, Inés Katzenstein

Director: Ferrán Barenblit
Participants: Sebastian Cichocki, Cosmin Costinas, Inti Guerrero, Miguel López

Directors: Emily Pethick, María Inés Rodríguez
Participants: Alessio Antoniolli, Fatima Bintou Rassoul, Kari Conte, Sally Mizrachii, Markus Reymann, Martijntje Hallmann, Maria Virto Marcilla

Conceived by Marina Fokidis and curated by Pedro G. Romero, this daily live sound interventions’ program is comprised of live performances meant to be heard through the announcement loudspeakers of ARCOmadrid so as to briefly interrupt all transactions and actions and to create a collective (listening) moment.

The pregón is a popular form of public communication. Its origins lie in the historical ways of announcing administrative or liturgical orders. The Flamenco pregón, comes from an old Mediterranean tradition, and is essentially commercial. It was used to sell peaches, grapes, wine, seafood, etc. It is still striking, to hear these voices hawking the merchandise in the popular markets. At the same time, in the markets of northern Africa and the middle east, where Islam is the predominant religion, we often hear the call to prayer on loudspeakers. These calls may sometimes sound like a pregón to us. In fact, Walter Benjamin says that capitalism operates as a kind of religion. Museums are both the major shopping malls and the cathedrals where the new cult is celebrated. Art fairs have a flea market element to them, reminiscent of the traveling market or the big bazaar. All of this just to set the context. Artists are free to interpret it. We simply propose them as a voice for these living coins that we essentially are. In their performances there is a critical dimension of the ever-overrated ‘money,’ the measure of all things. Pawed, in our pockets, displayed through our fingers like rings, hanging around our necks, in our bags below our armpits or close to our hearts, in tour wallets, stuck to our asses, there is a material view of money that clashes with the spirituality of financial capitalism. P.G.R.

How can artists contribute to create communities where institutions are absent? How do they suggest potential forms of de-patrimonialization of our common heritage as so so as to keep it alive? All the participants in these two round tables are committed to collective practices, critically actualizing our Mediterranean tradition of fluid circulation of practices, methods, knowledge and material. Bringing them in conversation allows us to collectively examine singular practices and methods, examining exploring how those spaces of knowledge production and dissemination allow us to picture new maps of our known Mediterranean world in order to envision a new future within our region. B.K

For a new cartography of film and video in the region: archiving, restoring, disseminating.

Moderator: Bouchra Khalili

Participants: Vartan Avakian (Arab Image Foundation, Beirut), Martine Derain (Film Flamme, Marseille), Lucie Maxin (Cinémathèque, Tánger), Simona Malatesta (Ovni Arhives, Barcelona)

This panel focuses on lens-based media and time-media media in the Mediterranean, from Beirut to Tangiers, and from Barcelona to Marseilles. Film and photography have been transformative media in the region, urging us in a post-colonial context to produce counter-representations shaped by the experiences, stories and, voices of the ones that they have no histories or whose stories werehave been silenced and suppressed.

Drifting archipelagos 

Moderator: Bouchra Khalili

Participants: Laila Hida (Le 18, Marrakech), Emily Jacir (Dar Jacir, Bethleem), Lamia Joreige (Beirut Art Center)

This panel brings together artists from Greece and Palestine, Morocco and Lebanon, to investigate the major important role played by art practitioners in exhibition making, knowledge production and dissemination, and community building in spaces where institutional support is non-existent. In these contexts artists are reinventing communal spaces where art making, art exhibition, mediation and, education, are being interconnected, reformulated and reinvented. B.K.

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Introduction by the program curator Hila Peleg - The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years

between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the

syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Curator: Hila Peleg - The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years

between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the

syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.

Conceived by Marina Fokidis and curated by Pedro G. Romero, this daily live sound interventions’ program is comprised of live performances meant to be heard through the announcement loudspeakers of ARCOmadrid so as to briefly interrupt all transactions and actions and to create a collective (listening) moment.

The pregón is a popular form of public communication. Its origins lie in the historical ways of announcing administrative or liturgical orders. The Flamenco pregón, comes from an old Mediterranean tradition, and is essentially commercial. It was used to sell peaches, grapes, wine, seafood, etc. It is still striking, to hear these voices hawking the merchandise in the popular markets. At the same time, in the markets of northern Africa and the middle east, where Islam is the predominant religion, we often hear the call to prayer on loudspeakers. These calls may sometimes sound like a pregón to us. In fact, Walter Benjamin says that capitalism operates as a kind of religion. Museums are both the major shopping malls and the cathedrals where the new cult is celebrated. Art fairs have a flea market element to them, reminiscent of the traveling market or the big bazaar. All of this just to set the context. Artists are free to interpret it. We simply propose them as a voice for these living coins that we essentially are. In their performances there is a critical dimension of the ever-overrated ‘money,’ the measure of all things. Pawed, in our pockets, displayed through our fingers like rings, hanging around our necks, in our bags below our armpits or close to our hearts, in tour wallets, stuck to our asses, there is a material view of money that clashes with the spirituality of financial capitalism. P.G.R.

Moderator: Marina Fokidis

Participants: Çelenk Bafra (director SAHA, Turkey), Meriem Berrada (director of cultural programs Alliances Foundation, artistic director of MACAAL, Morocco), Elina Koundouri (director of Neon Foundation, Athens), Cristiano Raimondi (artistic director of SDA, Monaco)

How far is Art from Life? Exhibitions from Headlines? Projects from Actions? Poetry from Reality?

These are some fundamental questions that appear and reappear all the time, in a rhythm that turns them almost banal but not redundant. For this panel-discussions-in the form of news-broadcasts, invited museums and foundations directors, (with a strong engagement in the Mediterranean region) had to fulfil a brief exercise: Instead oftrying to present their curatorial approach and strategy within ten min, a task which is by default impossible, they were kindly asked to select a headline from the current news (of the last weeks), to address it to the public and to comment on how they seek to answer societal issues within their work in their respective institutions. M.F.

Presentations, debates, conversations, actions, performances and things we don't know.

Participants: Juan Pablo Macías (Salvatore Rosa), André Sousa (Uma Certa Falta de Coerência), Mauro Cerqueira (Uma Certa Falta de Coerência), Leire Vergara (Bulegoak), Carlos García Simón (Corrientes), Antonio Collados (Los Tientos), Pedro Ordóñez (Los Tientos), Pedro Barragán (Sociedad flamenca El Dorado), Cristina Hergueta (pie.fmc), Enrique Fuenteblanca (La aceitera), Joaquín Vázquez (pie.fmc), Julio Jara, José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, Tomás de Perrate, Niño de Elche, Pedro G.Romero.

This programme is an endeavour to understand the popular song, as a minimal unit of our market economy. We strive to understand how to use the immaterial nature of practises like music and dance to strengthen our economy, not only in terms of money, accumulating capital, etc, but also as the economic basis for what the distribution of the world’s wealth means. When we take arts like flamenco, that uses music and dance as the basis for its performance, as our working model, we are taking a stance in relation to the political and commercial future of our world. I won’t limit my considerations to the flamenco, fado, rai or klezmer of our Mediterranean shores, it is better understood if we also include tango, the Mexican corrido or rock and roll. We are talking about the affective management of the world and how these affections should be the basis of our economies. It’s not exactly an utopia, though the drive behind it is certainly utopian. We’re talking about reverting the hegemonic processes of capital expansion in mass culture, about liberating the affective power financial mechanism about emancipating the effects of the voice from the technical media that reduce it to a mere economic device. It is there, where the danger grows, that our salvation grows too.

We have brought together a group of artists, mediators and producers close to these practices to discuss about the possibilities of all this. It is a situated group that shares a certain context and a perspective that allows us to really talk about the things that happen in our world. P.G.R.

Conceived by Marina Fokidis and curated by Pedro G. Romero, this daily live sound interventions’ program is comprised of live performances meant to be heard through the announcement loudspeakers of ARCOmadrid so as to briefly interrupt all transactions and actions and to create a collective (listening) moment.

The pregón is a popular form of public communication. Its origins lie in the historical ways of announcing administrative or liturgical orders. The Flamenco pregón, comes from an old Mediterranean tradition, and is essentially commercial. It was used to sell peaches, grapes, wine, seafood, etc. It is still striking, to hear these voices hawking the merchandise in the popular markets. At the same time, in the markets of northern Africa and the middle east, where Islam is the predominant religion, we often hear the call to prayer on loudspeakers. These calls may sometimes sound like a pregón to us. In fact, Walter Benjamin says that capitalism operates as a kind of religion. Museums are both the major shopping malls and the cathedrals where the new cult is celebrated. Art fairs have a flea market element to them, reminiscent of the traveling market or the big bazaar. All of this just to set the context. Artists are free to interpret it. We simply propose them as a voice for these living coins that we essentially are. In their performances there is a critical dimension of the ever-overrated ‘money,’ the measure of all things. Pawed, in our pockets, displayed through our fingers like rings, hanging around our necks, in our bags below our armpits or close to our hearts, in tour wallets, stuck to our asses, there is a material view of money that clashes with the spirituality of financial capitalism. P.G.R.

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Curator: Hila Peleg - The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years

between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the

syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Curator: Hila Peleg - The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.

Film program with works by Basma Alsharif, Lina Majdalaniei and Rabih Mroué. Curator: Hila Peleg - The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The program features selected non-fiction artist’s films and videos produced over the last ten years between the middle east and Europe. The films are experimenting with forms of narration and with the syntax of the moving image. Their makers are committed to finding unique artistic forms to navigate and come to terms with complex, at times devastating social realities while exploring the collective and personal histories that inform them. Both incisive and lyrical, the films reflect the region’s political conflicts and the European legacy of colonialism.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. Lina Majdalanie is a Lebanese performer, director and playwright. Rabih Mroué, born in Beirut, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. H.P.