Critical Thinking Gatherings

Feminist and anti-racist political scientist Françoise Vergès gives a lecture on the relationship between the massacre of the Palestinian people and the history of Western democracies built on colonialism, and thus on the genocide of indigenous peoples, extraction, exploitation and destruction of the environment. Vergès analyses how, along with other peoples from the Congo, Sudan, Kashmir and those territories struggling for freedom and decolonialisation, Palestine represents an example of resistance to the global reactionism shaped by the extreme militarisation, dehumanisation and absolutist and authoritarian thinking that perpetuates colonial domination.   

The assembly of Museo Situado, made up of social collectives from the Lavapiés neighbourhood in Madrid, in which the Museo Reina Sofía also participates, devotes this thirty-first edition of Situated Voices to thinking collectively, from this context, about the forms of opposition to the war in Gaza — and all wars — as well as strategies of support and solidarity with the Palestinian people. The current context of militarisation and global fear, intensified in recent years by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, raises the question of how we can organise against world destruction. In this session, Museo Situado assembles different voices to hear their analyses and political practices and thereby contribute to collectively building a future of justice, reparation and peace in Palestine and around the world.   

— Conducted by Amin Husain, Nitasha Dhillon (Decolonize This Place), Marina Garcés and Massimiliano Mollona (Institute of Radical Imagination)

This session features the presentation of the global project Palestine is Everywhere, centred on the actions of activists who, from different places in the world, aim to spotlight the oppression of the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom. The presentation, conducted by Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon from the Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement, philosopher Marina Garcés, and Massimiliano Mollona, from the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), is made up of a round-table discussion and the screening of different video extracts with interventions from renowned theorists and artists, before closing with a streamed poetic reading by Palestinian writer and lecturer Ibrahim Nasrallah.

Now in its sixth edition, the Neighbourhood Picnic returns to turn the Museo Reina Sofía Garden into a space of encounter, enjoyment and resistance by and for all residents from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood. This year, given the emergency situation in Palestine, the Museo Situado assembly sets forth a performance action that condemns the war in Gaza and a discussion with feminist philosopher Silvia Federici.

This encounter welcomes screenings of films by Shuruq Harb (Ramallah, 1980), Shereen Abdel-Karim Hassanein (Gaza City, 1996) and Lara Salous (Ramallah, 1988), three Palestinian multidisciplinary artists that are part of the Tadafuq project, which provides artistic training and mentoring online for Palestinian creatives from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem. The initiative has been developed by artist and curator Nicolás Combarro since 2020.

Alongside the film screenings is a conversation between Harb and Salous, accompanied by Sara Buraya Boned (Museo Reina Sofía), as they reflect on their experience as Palestinian women artists from a feminist perspective, exploring the possibilities of disseminating the Palestinian cause through their art-making, work which is punctuated by their ideas, desires and personal hopes. 

The audiovisual piece by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, entitled At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other, spotlights the violence implicit in the construction of images and the position facing people considered illegal, disposable and invisible, not only in Palestine but also in broader political and social contexts, at those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other. The work, eleven minutes in length, combines three visual elements which overlap to form layers of information: night-time images of the wall that runs along the Gaza Strip, digital images of avatars and a reflective text by the artists. The work was donated to the Museo Reina Sofía Collection by Mercedes Vilardell in 2024.  

The installation Chroniques d’un assasinat (Chronicles of an Assassination, 2021), donated to the Museo in 2022 by its creator, the artist Amos Gitai, focuses on the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which shocked the world and brought the peace plans to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a standstill. This major event also impacted the artist, who turned it into one of the main threads in his work. Chroniques d’un assasinat sets forth a spatial journey around pertinent scenes from Rabin, the Last Day (2015) by way of fourteen panels and seven sound documents. Using collage, akin to a film montage, Gitai combines archive documents, press images and stills which intervene to dissect the context of a tragic moment that changed the history of the Middle East.    

Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, the museum confederation L’Internationale, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is part, has supported and organised a series of actions that include residencies for Palestinian artists and specific, conflict-related programmes. Among these initiatives is the digital publication Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency, published by the L’Internationale Online Editorial Board, which contains interventions by Learning Palestine Group, Radio Alhara, Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, Rana Issa, Françoise Vergès, Bojana Piškur, Mick Wilson, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, The Free Palestine Iniciative Croatia and Baqiya and Yu’ad. The publication is part of the Critical Media Alliances activity within the Museum of the Commons programme.

Tansik (تنسيق) means “coordination” in Arabic. Picking olives in zones of the West Bank under Israeli military control requires “coordination” with the Israeli army, yet the real purpose of such “coordination” is to make harvesting problematic and cause damage. During October and November in 2019, Meira Asher, a composer, performer and human rights activist, joined her friends Kalef and Walid to harvest olives in the town of Kufr Qaddum. This podcast, commissioned by the Museo Reina Sofía, witnesses Asher document the situation via interviews and her own experience.

In 2013, the Egyptian authorities withheld a stork migrating from Hungary to Israel due to an electronic device that was attached to its back. The suspicion was espionage. The podcast The General’s Stork (2018), by Egyptian artist and lecturer Heba Y. Amin, explores the historical accounts of biblical prophecies, colonial narrations, and the politics of war technology from a bird’s-eye view. When the war started to be dictated by technological needs, conquering the sky turned Western armed conflicts into a high-tech armed spectacle. Since then, technological aesthetics have been intrinsically linked to the image of the Middle East, and the language of occupation and colonisation translated into the vision of the landscape at war as a topographic study, a kind of aerial cartography of bombing and drones.       

Made up of seventeen culture organisations from Spain, among them the Museo Reina Sofía, TEJA came into being after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and going forward it offers artist residencies, accommodation, support and legal counsel to artists and culture professionals affected by armed conflicts, political repression and other emergency situations. Today, the Museo supports Palestinian artists Motasem Siam, Lara Salous and Shuruq Harb by way of public presentations and activations, advocating their contact with artistic communities and networks from the institution and the city of Madrid.