The Museo Reina Sofía, in the context of Documenta Madrid, is organizing a retrospective of Ute Aurand (Germany, 1957), one of the most admired experimental filmmakers of recent decades. Spanning over 40 films, Aurand's work stands out for being in the first person, a form of poetry, films based on the formal characteristics of analog 16mm film. The author will be present in Madrid to present her work and talk with the public.

DocumentaMadrid is dedicating this year's edition to archival images, which is the reason we wanted to propose this series to Ute Aurand. Cinema was born as a great archive of the world. The first filmmakers of the late 19th century would travel around with this modern invention to record, show and collect together far-away places, which would bring shortly thereafter commerce and industry for expansionist purposes. Ute Aurand belongs to an opposite tradition, one in which cinema, far from conquering the world visually, gets blended into and diluted with everyday experience. Ute Aurand's film work is also an archive, though not an encyclopedic repertoire of places and subjects. Instead, it collects together lives, memories and everyday moments which are transfigured masterfully into beautiful epiphanies by the camera and a singular poetics of 16mm.

Ute Aurand shoots all her films on 16mm celluloid with a Bolex, the camera of experimental cinema by definition. Her work delves deep into all the material and processual qualities of analog cinema, thereby affirming it as an aesthetic and artisan practice, one inseparable from a way of seeing, one that opposes the logics of the digital image so predominant in our present day. Aspects such as the 30-second sequences resulting from the film's maximum duration, the in-camera editing and the limited footage join together with the chromatic vibration and the graininess to give shape to a beautiful poetics of transience, one that responds to both the technique and the subject filmed.

Aurand's films are vibrant portraits of friends and family as well as landscapes of places that the author finds meaningful. The director has worked in both genres for decades and, for this reason, each one has a monographic program in this film series. Aurand's portraits and landscapes are a way of dialoguing with the passage of time while retaining the profoundly intimate character of existence; they are moments of life transmuted into films. The third program is dedicated to Aurand's collective conversation with other first-person film auteurs, such as Margaret Tait, Marie Menken and Ewelina Rosinska. Designed by Aurand herself, this session alludes to the film programming and curating work that she has done for decades at Arsenal. Institute for Film and Video Art, a world-class German institution.

Chema González is the Head of the Department of Film and New Media at the Museo Reina Sofía. He has organized the cycle in close collaboration with the artist.