Held on 24 May 2023
The right to the city and public space, understood as a communal life territory, is increasingly at risk. The rising cost of housing, the emptying-out of social centres and police violence as a form of social control are just some of the symptoms of growing privatisation. Such circumstances bring to light more sharply the need for a common space built to encompass the interests, needs and desires of the communities that inhabit it.
Opposite the capitalist concept of the city as a financial centre or tourist park built for consumerism, Situated Voices 28 seeks to articulate the foundations, from collectiveness, to reformulate concepts of property and belonging in relation to public space. How can we impact the desired city model? How can we reclaim, defend, attain, conquer or confer the right to the city? Who remains outside of this right? Who are legitimised for its reclamation and who are not? Who do we exclude and which divides (social, economic, gender-based, racial, among others) hinder its application? From institutions, how can we facilitate a participatory city based on asylum, reciprocity and mutual recognition?
In looking for the answers to these questions, this encounter is set out as a space for sharing experiences, tools and neighbourhood actions which search for channels of collective transformation. A conversation-discussion takes place in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, prompting, from specific lived experiences, attendees to reflect on the right to the city and the possibilities of intervening in and reappropriating urban spaces.
This activity offers a children’s play centre organised by the collectives Esta es una plaza (This Is a Square) and Banco de Alimentos del Barrio (The Neighbourhood Food Bank) to facilitate work and childcare. Click on this link and fill out the form to sign up.
Mercedes Arce “Chiqui” is a librarian and a co-founder and current chairperson of Parque Sí Chamberí (Park for Me, Chamberí), a neighbourhood association which works to defend, advocate, promote and develop green areas and recreation in Madrid’s Chamberí neighbourhood. She also participated in making the documentary De interés general. Un barrio por un parque (Common Good. A Neighbourhood for a Park, 2021), by Miguel Ángel Sánchez Sebastián.
Jose Luis Fdez. Casadevante “Kois” is a sociologist, international food sovereignty expert at the International University of Andalusia (UNIA) and a member of the Garúa cooperative. He is also a neighbourhood activist, and is currently involved in promoting urban agriculture projects as the head of Huertos Urbanos (Urban Allotments) at the Regional Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Madrid (FRAVM). Furthermore, he writes the blog Raíces en el asfalto (Roots on the Pavement)
Dolores Galindo Fontán is a journalist and researcher of social and cultural anthropology. She is the chairperson of Dragones de Lavapiés, a football club whose mission is to weave, through sporting values and competition, ties of solidarity, respect and community, advocating dialogue between people from more than fifty different countries.
Sara Porras Sánchez is a professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. She works as a researcher on different research projects in the Community of Madrid, analysing urban processes and conflicts and the importance of socio-community networks in the configuration of neighbourhoods and in creating social space.
Eduardo Ramis is an anthropologist and a member of the Pasillo Verde Imperial Neighbourhood Association, one of the member collectives in the platform #YoDefiendoEsteÁrbol (#IDefendThisTree), which came into being to protect trees and green areas under threat from the project to expand Metro de Madrid’s Line 11 in five areas of the city (Arganzuela, Carabanchel, Moratalaz, Puente de Vallecas and Retiro).
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Banco de Alimentos del Barrio y Esta es una plaza
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Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.