Eli Cortiñas, The Most Given of Givens [Lo más dado de lo dado], 2016, three-channel video installation. Museo Reina Sofía © Eli Cortiñas, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026
La máquina sueña con humo (The Machine Dreams of Smoke) stems from the invitation by the Museo Reina Sofía to Eli Cortiñas (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1979) to revisit The Most Given of Givens [Lo más dado de lo dado], a video work produced by the artist in 2016 and recently acquired for the Museum's Collections. The exhibition proposal takes up, expands and updates an investigation begun by the artist more than a decade ago, in which she addresses the relations between the history of cinema, the history of museums and recent digital culture from a perspective that reveals a complex colonial apparatus that shapes the gaze and the construction of imaginaries and knowledge.
In The Most Given of Givens, Cortiñas focuses on cinema, the machine that throughout the twentieth century has centralised the production of images and that, therefore, has determined which bodies must be represented and which memories and narratives are legitimate, thus configuring a specific regime of visuality. Through laborious archival work on found footage, the artist analyses the cinematic image of Tarzan, exposing how Hollywood adventure cinema drew on ethnographic film to fabricate the popular imaginary about African peoples as an "other" translated through a colonial gaze and logic. In the films about this man of English origin raised in the jungle, ethnographic images filmed in Africa with the intention of capturing the ways of life of its inhabitants were used as a background landscape, by means of back projection, against which the actors were filmed in the foreground.
The expressive capacity of this cinematic collage arises from the clash and association of images. Alongside a multitude of found fragments, the artist projects current images of a Greek acropolis under construction, a metaphor for a hegemonic European culture in ruins that has historically silenced the presence of any foreign ancestral culture. In this way, Cortiñas exposes those who operate the production of subjectivity in the face of an objectified otherness.
The artist uses the antechamber of Espacio 1 to amplify these ideas spatially and sculpturally, alluding to the museum apparatus and to the new technological devices for producing and disseminating images as the machinery that underpins the construction of knowledge in our contemporary era. With the help of artificial intelligence and by drawing on image archives licensed for commercial purposes, the artist creates a stage set that seeks a false neutrality. In a colourful pastel, referring to the chroma keys used as backgrounds in the production of digital scenes, display cases appear emptied of the objects plundered during the colonial period. These still form part of numerous European collections, awaiting a restitution that does not arrive. The museum, a Western invention that for decades has participated in the desacralisation of usurped objects, is here inhabited by new amulets and hands that touch, classify, study or watch over, thanks to the prosthesis of today's sacred artefacts.
Part of contemporary historiography takes for granted that history is not neutral, that every historical account implies a selection, an interpretation that generates omissions and dominant historical narratives that have helped consolidate the power of certain social groups. Cortiñas also suggests that algorithms are not neutral: each new technological tool at our disposal constitutes a device loaded with a symbolic function that participates in the configuration of new epistemological regimes.
In short, Eli Cortiñas invites us to distrust the apparent transparency of images, technology and the museographic apparatus. She proposes interrogating these visual and cognitive systems not only for what they show, but for the power relations that affect them, as well as for the contexts, bodies, memories and historical experiences that produce and traverse them.
© Ministerio de Cultura - Gobierno de España