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.
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.
Dear Felix:
Saturdays at 6pm
The immediately recognisable art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which is on display, from May to October 2026, in the show Sweet Revenge, moves beyond the transmission of messages laden with poetic evocation, vital or biographical reflection, or even a clear political or ethical positioning. Rather, it seeks an active response by visitors to the exhibition. His work invites engagement with these messages so that, whether delighting, moving or challenging, it still prompts viewers to participate in the dialogue and complete the artistic undertaking with their own actions.
Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
1926–2026: One Hundred Years of the Lyceum Club Femenino
Thursday, 2 July 2026
The Lyceum Club Femenino (Lyceum Women’s Club) was established in Madrid in 1926, constituting a space which opened new pathways for women to participate in Spain’s intellectual, artistic and political life in the first third of the twentieth century, and for figures such as designer Victorina Durán, pedagogue María de Maeztu, lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and artist Ángeles Santos, to name but a few. To mark the Madrid Club’s one hundredth anniversary, this research symposium examines its role as a key place for studying women’s and feminist culture in Spain’s Silver Age by analysing and vindicating the different agencies, trajectories and cultural projects that structured the space.
By way of three lectures and two round-table discussions, the symposium sets forth a journey through the Lyceum Club Femenino and the cultural context from which it emerged, from its standing as a pioneering institution to the study of cultural material from the period and the process of constructing the figure of the “modern woman”. These talks and discussions look to shed light on how new ways of thinking, creating and occupying public space were shaped, expanding the gaze on cultural, educational and social networks linked to the Lyceum — as much concerning its ties with other intellectual and artistic circles as the continuity and transformation of these networks during Republican exile. Finally, the symposium features three artistic interventions conceived to recover the artistic legacy of this space in Madrid.
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the Ministry of Culture’s cultural programme focused on the centenary of the Lyceum Club Femenino via these sessions, co-organised with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
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.