For a Care Statute. A Collective Writing Proposal for a Legal Fiction with Real Effects
Study Group
![Darya von Berner, Cintia, de la serie fotográfica Political Maternity [Maternidad política], 2015-2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/estatuto_cuidados.png.webp)
Held on 25 feb 2021
What would happen if we thought of care as a job? What is stopping us from thinking that way? What is gained and what is lost? Why don’t those who provide care have the right to rest, retire and receive payment? Why does this activity remain marginalised from the productive, the public and the visible? And what if we thought and wrote about rights, payment and the relationships of bodies that gestate and support?
This study group sets out from these questions to propose a collaborative exercise of legal fiction, the aim being to formulate, on the basis of Spain’s Workers’ Statute, a possible Care Statue, voluntarily applying the customary labour law language and the trade union struggle as an appropriation that sets in motion political imagination and foreshadows future scenarios.
The programme is divided into five sessions approached from trans-inclusive, intersectional, anti-racist, non-Eurocentric and non-essentialist feminisms, with each encounter organised around a talk given by a guest speaker, followed by an exercise to collaboratively write the Statute. The study group coordinators, Luisa Fuentes Guaza and Marta Malo, are joined by lawyer and activist Marta Busquets; writer, teacher and activist Silvia Federici; carer and activist Graciela Gallego; sociologist, educator and translator Helen Torres; and teacher and researcher Cristina Vega.
Programme
Thursday, 25 February 2021
Session 1. What Are the Bodies or Sphere of Application?
Who administers care and who receives care, both in the home and in other social care institutions (schools, care homes, youth centres, centres for vulnerable children…)? Why these bodies and not others? What are the implications in terms of the position in the social body? Taking on these questions, this introductory session sets out the idea of a Care Statute and will delve into speculative fiction as a transfeminist exercise of prefiguration for urgent futures.
Thursday, 11 March 2021
Session 2. What Are the Subject Matter and Infrastructures?
By way of a reflection on the specific nature of work implied in care, a debate is sought around the means of production upholding its current social organisation. The demands and needs, as much of bodies that care as bodies that require care, enable us to imagine which infrastructures could foster more agreeable and less oppressive social organisation.
Thursday, 22 April 2021
Session 3. What Are the Rights?
Which rights would correspond to bodies that care and bodies that need care? On the basis of Article 4 of Spain’s Workers’ Statute, there will be a study of equivalent rights for the Care Statute and the formulation and guarantee types such key rights may have, for instance the right to rest time (Article 37). Furthermore, there will be a definition of the need to define new and specific rights for care work.
Thursday, 6 May 2021
Session 4. What Are the Working Hours and Payment?
How can we establish hours and payment for the range of care practices? This session seeks to explore further the concept of salary, its structure, the wage guarantee fund and interprofessional guaranteed minimum wage. Different quantification strategies drafted from the feminist economy to determine the cost of assets and services produced by bodies that take on care work will be discussed here. In addition to attempting to unravel the different types of work accumulated in this sphere, the aim is to imagine another structuring of working hours, which are generally continuous, that does not naturalise either the exhaustion of care bodies or the infantilisation of cared-for bodies.
Thursday, 3 June 2021
Session 5. What Are the Possible Unionisations?
Can we articulate collective negotiation in care work? Drawing on references of articles that regulate collective negotiation, this session attempts to identify the agents that should sit around a possible negotiation table on the social organisation of care: managers, government, unions… additionally, there is a desire to think about modes of unionism of care work in different variants: Which mechanisms of organisation, tools of self-protection and strategies of pressure and negotiation are being tried out and which can be conceivably imagined?
Coordinated by
Luisa Fuentes Guaza and Marta Malo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Marta Busquets Gallego is a feminist activist and lawyer specialised in gender and sexual and reproductive rights, and president of Dona Llum - Associació Catalana per un Part Respectat. She is a podcaster on Maternidades con gafas violetas and author of the book Mi embarazo y mi parto son míos (Pol·len, 2019).
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American writer, teacher and feminist activist who has been one of the driving forces behind campaigns started to vindicate wages for housework done by women as a claim from the feminist economy. She worked for a number of years as a teacher in Nigeria and is currently professor emerita at Hofstra University in New York. Both paths meet in two of her best-known works: Calibán y la bruja: mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria (Traficantes de Sueños, 2004) and Revolución en punto cero: trabajo doméstico, reproducción y luchas feministas (Traficantes de Sueños, 2013).
Luisa Fuentes Guaza is an independent researcher and theorist and activist for emancipatory, anti-racist and non-colonial maternal work. She coordinates the study groups on maternal work in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre: Critical Bodies that Gestate and/or Support and The Switch of Internal Mobilisations (Intimate-Revolutions) on Maternal Work. Furthermore, she works in collaboration with institutions, platforms and collectives in Central America, Mexico, Chile and Peru.
Graciela Gallego Cardona has worked caring for the elderly for the past 19 years and is an activist for the rights and dignity of domestic and care workers. She is one of the promoters of the recently conceived Union of Home and Care Workers (SINTRAHOCU).
Marta Malo is a translator and independent researcher and editor and co-author of Nociones comunes. Ensayos entre investigación y militancia (Traficantes de Sueños, 2004) and A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina (Traficantes de Sueños, 2004). She has helped drive different spaces and initiatives of activist research, such as Precarias a la deriva, Observatorio Metropolitan, Ferrocarril Clandestino-Manos Invisibles, Entrar Afuera and Laboratoria.
Helen Torres is a sociologist, educator and translator who works from feminist and decolonial perspectives in the articulation between language, art and politics. Her publications include the novel Autopsia de una langosta (Melusina, 2010) and the anthology Relatos marranos (Pol·len, 2015). Moreover, she has developed geo-localised sound narratives and literary walks, and specialises in the work of Donna Haraway, translating a number of her works into Spanish. She currently conducts workshops of speculative fabulation.
Cristina Vega has been a research professor at the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Latin American University of Social Studies (FLACSO), Ecuador, since 2011, and is coordinator of its PhD in Sociology (2020–2023). She is also part of the Ecuadorian feminist collective Flor de Guanto. Her research centres on Gender Studies, focusing on an analysis of work, reproduction and care. At the present time she is conducting a gender-based study of reactionary advances.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 – 7pm
Ángel Calvo Ulloa, curator of the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, engages in conversation with artist Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) in the Museo’s Auditorium 400 to explore in greater depth the exhibition discourse of this anthological show spanning four decades of Uslé’s artistic career.
The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Crossed Vignettes
Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), features the participation of the Casa de Velázquez and is framed inside the context of the CALC programme The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), co-directed by Virginie Giuliana. It is also the outcome of the projects Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area, CA19119) and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences, CA24160).