The public program accompanying the exhibition Listening All Night To The Rain by John Akomfrah presents a diverse array of events including performative walkthroughs, a film cycle in partnership with the Filmoteca Española, discussions, and workshops. At its heart, the program explores the structures and enduring legacies of climate colonialism—including extractivism, forced displacement, environmental racism, and collective memory—with particular attention to their manifestations in Sudan and Palestine. By bringing together artists, dancers, historians, and activists, the public program aims to foster a space for critical inquiry, collective listening, and transformation.
ARTIST TALK with John Akomfrah and Tarini Malik
Date and time: 03/11/2025. 6:00 pm
Location: Auditorium, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Access: By invitation only, until capacity is reached
Language: English with simultaneous translation into Spanish
Curator Tarini Malik and artist John Akomfrah will engage in a conversation tracing the ideas, images, and histories that shape Listening All Night To The Rain. Moving between discussion and reflection, this Artist Talk opens up Akomfrah’s creative process—his use of montage, sound, and archival material to weave together personal and collective memory. Together, they will reflect on the poetic and political dimensions of listening, and on how sound and image can become acts of remembrance and connection.
SCREENING AND CONVERSATION WITH THE OTOLITH GROUP, MODERATED BY ANNETT BUSCH
As part of the exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain by John Akomfrah, the film MASCON: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy (2024) is presented at the museum. The work is produced by The Otolith Group, a collective formed by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, whose practice combines film, theory, and critical inquiry to explore history and memory. The film investigates the works of Senegalese filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety, exploring the gestures and geographies of Sahelian cinema and evoking what Stephen Henderson defines as “Mascon”: a Black creative energy capable of transforming imagination. After the screening, Sagar and Eshun will discuss their career, influences, and the creative process behind the work with research-curator, editor, writer and translator Annett Busch
This is an activity by Organismo | Art in Critical Ecologies in collaboration with the public program for John Akomfrah's exhibition Listening to the Rain All Night. The collaboration with The Otolith Collective arose from the case study Pyroecologies in Organismo Year One.
Date and time: 26/11/2025
6:30–7:10 p.m. Screening of MASCON: A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy (2024). (Original version)
7:10–8:00 p.m. Discussion
Location: Auditorium, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Access: Free admission until full capacity is reached, with prior download of a free ticket. A quota of 10% of the capacity is reserved for entry without a prior ticket on the day of the event.
Language: film - original version. Conversation: English with simultaneous translation into Spanish.
NOCTURNAL WALKTHROUGHS
Rather than traditional interpretive or guided tours, the Nocturnal Walkthroughs offer constellational readings that position Akomfrah’s work within pressing contemporary contexts. Following an open call held this past summer, three interdisciplinary proposals were selected to activate the exhibition space and bring fresh perspectives to Akomfrah’s practice. By experiencing the exhibition through these alternative lenses, the program seeks to foster dialogue and highlight the urgency of understanding today’s interwoven global crises.
The activity will take place at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid on Saturday evenings. Two sessions: 9.00 and 10.00 pm with an approximate duration of 45 minutes each session.
Listening Transmissions - Hannah Kemp-Welch
Listening and Sound Workshop
Date and time: 29/11/2025, 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm
Location: Exhibition space, Floor -1, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Registration: Through this link on Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza´s website
Access: Free activity with prior registration required
Recommended age: All audiences. Groups of 20 people
Language: Spanish and English
Hannah Kemp-Welch’s Sonic Walkthrough invites visitors to respond to the exhibition Listening All Night To The Rain through sound. Participants can select sounds within the works while also adding their own using microphones and short-range radio transmitters. As they move around the gallery, participants enter different zones of broadcast from others, creating combinations of sounds that blend with the works and form unique layers of transmission and delay. Collectivity is central—we find a sense of flow in the exhibition, moving together-in-sound and exchanging responses to its themes from a plurality of experiences. Drawing on Kemp-Welch’s focus on listening as a form of social action, the activity invites visitors to explore the interplay of receiving and transmitting, and to consider how listening and sounding together shapes the experience of the exhibition.
THE SACRED, WITHOUT WORLD – ACT III by Vir Andres Hera
Performance
Date and time: 24/01/2026 and 07/02/2026, 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm
Location: Exhibition space, Floor -1, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Registration: Through this link on Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza´s website.
Access: Free activity with prior registration required
Recommended age: All audiences. Groups of 20 people
Language: Spanish
Vir Andres Hera presents THE SACRED, WITHOUT WORLD - ACT III, a nocturnal performance that interweaves oceanic sounds, seismic vibrations, voices, and sound loops to weave a polyphonic narrative where fragmented bodies attempt to reconstitute themselves. The action unfolds as a listening ritual: a gesture of “re-membering” dismembered bodies and confronting the silences of colonial archives. Inspired by the radical method of Marlene NourbeSe Philip, the performance becomes a living archive where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and the more-than-human, dissolve. A space of vibration and memory where sound becomes testimony and threshold.
Listening All Night to the Marassa with Inés Sybille and Malvin Montero
Performance
Date and time: 17/01/2026 and 31/01/2026, 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm
Location: Exhibition space, Floor -1, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Registration: Through this link on Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza´s website
Access: Free activity with prior registration required
Recommended age: All audiences. Groups of 20 people
Language: Spanish
Listening All Night to the Marassa is a dance activation of John Akomfrah’s exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain. Dancers Malvin Montero and Inés Sybille glide through the moving iconography of the Marassa twins from Haitian-Dominican Vodou. The philosophical, aesthetic, sonic, and choreographic variations of this mysterious pair dive into echoes and samples from Akomfrah’s aquatic body-archives. Like a diasporic network of connection, Angola’s Kuduro, Jamaica’s Dancehall, and Dominican Dembow allow them to flirt with machetes, horns, and laments. Within the syncretism of this jumble of codes, Malvin and Inés mobilize and produce memory, reterritorializing a spirituality that is erotic, protective, and strategic.
WORKSHOPS
EN EL AULA: JOHN AKOMFRAH
Date and time: 11/12/2025, 17:00h
Location: Exhibition space, Floor -1, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Participants: Marina Avia Estrada
Registration: Free activity with prior registration required through this link
Recommended age: Activity aimed at teachers and educators of early childhood education, primary, secondary, high school, universities, and vocational training.
Collaborators: educaThyssen
Language: Spanish
Guided discussion with Marina Avia Estrada, Head of Exhibitions and Public Programs at TBA21. This session aims to convey certain aspects and ideas of the exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain by John Akomfrah, offering tools and approaches that can help prepare a visit with students later on or be used independently in the classroom.
In this exhibition, Akomfrah presents a reflection on the structures and enduring legacies of climate colonialism, addressing themes such as extractivism, forced displacement, environmental racism, and collective memory. At the same time, he introduces listening as an act of remembrance and connection. The visit invites participants to listen to and engage with the interwoven relationships between soundscape, archival imagery, and collective memory.
DISPLACED LANDS, ENDANGERED LIVES: ENVIRONMENTAL COLONIALISM IN PALESTINE
BY LETSTALKPALESTINE
Date and time: January 16, 2026. 5 pm
Location: Sala Mirador, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Participants: Let’s Talk Palestine
Registration: Free activity with prior registration required through the website of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Language: Spanish
This January, LetsTalkPalestine will host a workshop exploring climate colonialism and the broader colonial frameworks shaping environmental harm in Palestine. The session will examine how occupation-driven policies and land practices can reshape local ecologies, drawing on activist and scholarly critiques that highlight issues such as the replacement of native tree species, disruptions to natural habitats, and the endangerment of regional wildlife. Using these cases as points of analysis, the workshop will investigate how political power influences environmental governance and how ecological degradation intersects with dispossession. Participants will engage with questions of stewardship, resistance, and the future of the land’s biodiversity under conditions of ongoing structural violence.
LAND, LIFE, RESISTANCE: SUDAN BY RACHID DIAB & SARAH BABIKER
Date and time: January 26, 2026, 5 pm
Location: Sala Mirador, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Participants: Rachid Diab & Sarah Babiker
Registration: Free activity with prior registration required through the website of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Language: Spanish
On January 26, a workshop on climate colonialism in Sudan will bring together artist Rachid Diab and journalist Sarah Babiker to explore how colonial legacies, conflicts, and extractive industries are transforming the country’s landscapes and ecosystems. The session will address urgent environmental challenges such as desertification and deforestation, while highlighting the resilience of Sudanese communities and artists. Alongside these themes, the discussion will focus on one of the central motifs in Diab’s work: Sudanese women, particularly in contexts of displacement or exile, and their role during the current crisis as bearers of memory, nurturers, and symbols of resistance.
FILM CYCLE IN COLLABORATION WITH THE FILMOTECA ESPAÑOLA, “TESTIMONIES: JOHN AKOMFRAH IN DIALOGUE”
Curated by Tarini Malik, this three-part film program explores cinema as testimony, resistance, and an alternative archive in the face of oppression, revolution, and exile. The first session focuses on protest movements in Britain and India, revealing state violence and authoritarian dynamics through archival and narrative works. The second centers on Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, tracing connections between Black activism and revolutionary leadership through essayistic and poetic cinema. The final program brings together films from Palestine and the Black Audio Film Collective, reflecting on exile, dispossession, and testimony as strategies of survival. Together, these screenings affirm cinema as a tool against erasure and colonial memory.
Night One: Testimonies of Resistance
Session presented by Tarini Malik (online connection)
Date and time: 13/01/2026, 19:00h
Location: Cine Doré, Madrid
Access: Ticket sales at the box office until full capacity is reached
Recommended age: All audiences are welcome
Language: Original version with Spanish subtitles
From Britain to India, these films expose how state power and authoritarianism are contested through the archive, testimony, and insurgent acts of resistance, revealing cinema as a weapon against erasure and repression.
1. Handsworth Songs – Black Audio Film Collective (UK, 1986, 59 min)
A landmark essay film weaving archival footage, newsreels, and testimonies to narrate the uprisings in Birmingham and London, dismantling mainstream media’s portrayal of Black communities.
Interval
2. Prisoners of Conscience - Anand Pathwardan (India, 1978, 40 min)
Patwardhan's first film to be widely screened in India, it emphasised the widespread policies of arrest and torture both before and after Indira Gandhi's dictatorship.
Night Two: Testimonies of Revolution
Session presented by Conciencia Afro
Date and time: 20/01/2026, 19:00h
Location: Cine Doré, Madrid
Access: Ticket sales at the box office until full capacity is reached
Recommended age: All audiences are welcome
Language: Original version with Spanish subtitles
Two visionary figures remembered through cinema’s counter-archives, mapping Black activism across continents.
1. Seven Songs for Malcolm X – Black Audio Film Collective (UK, 1993, 52 min)
A poetic, multi-layered portrait of Malcolm X that brings together archival footage and re-enactment to examine Black radical politics across the Atlantic.
Short Interval
2. Lumumba: La mort du prophète – Raoul Peck (Congo, 1990, 69 min)
An essayistic meditation on Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and its reverberations, blending archive, voiceover and personal reflection.
Night Three: Testimonies of Exile
Date and time: 27/01/2026, 19:00h
Location: Cine Doré, Madrid
Access: Ticket sales at the box office until full capacity is reached
Recommended age: All audiences are welcome
Language: Original version with Spanish subtitles
Bringing together films from Palestine and the Black Audio Film Collective that confront exile and dispossession. Each work insists on testimony - personal and collective - as a form of resistance and survival.
1. Testament – Black Audio Film Collective (UK, 1988, 88 min)
Following a Ghanaian exile returning home after years in Europe, this essay film explores colonial legacies, dislocation, and fractured memory, intertwining documentary testimony with poetic reflection.
Short Interval
2. They Do Not Exist – Mustafa Abu Ali (Palestine, 1974, 25 min)
Shot in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, this seminal work of revolutionary cinema documents everyday life alongside military resistance, reclaiming images of a people whom official histories sought to erase.
