Held on 22, 29 Mar 2025
SOS Racismo Madrid and the Alliance for Solidarity, together with Museo Situado, present the fifth edition of the Festival of Anti-racist Culture, in conjunction with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Through “artivism” and community creative processes, this encounter seeks to raise awareness of hate speech, call for anti-racist action and spotlight the agenda of racialised people. The festival, with the title Cooltura Futura, champions a change of paradigm in which diversity and anti-racism are its cornerstone. The encounter encompasses participatory spaces such as workshops, debates, ballroom and concerts, and features the participation of migrant, racialised and gender and sexual-affective dissidences. The activities that unfold embrace beauty, identity and community love and eschew the narrative of pain to build narratives of future, enjoyment and social transformation, demonstrating that art not only condemns inequalities but also opens pathways from pride, hope and collective strength.
The full programme is available here (in Spanish).
Collaboration
Madrid City Council and Teatro Accesible
Accessibility
Agenda
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Presentation of projects for the Artivism against Racism competition, by the Alliance for Solidarity
Locutorio Itinerante (Itinerant Phone Box) is an installation made by Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta that draws inspiration from the phone boxes that were prevalent in the 1990s. Via a series of short stories simulating telephone calls from the daily lives of migrant people, the stress is placed on challenges and strong bonds of alliance.
Sonoridades y corpografías sagradas (Sacred Sounds and Corpographies) is a proposal by the Migrantes Transgresorxs collective and is based on a series of encounters and workshops conducted by young people. By way of podcasts, distant memories and histories of resistance interweave to create a combative counter-discourse to racist, xenophobic and LGBTI-phobic narratives.
¿Qué Mi(g)ras? Fanzine, by the ¿Qué Mi(g)ras? collective, which originates from the Artivism Laboratory, puts forward different artistic techniques to make the work of migrant and racialised artists visible. On this occasion they will present a fanzine.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Get Ready with Peruvian transvestite Gad Yola
This session sees Gad Yola guide attendees so they can connect with the political history of drag and its relationship with the anti-racist struggle. Through examples and performances, it prompts a reflection on aesthetics and the drag/transvestite/transformist body. During her make-up, hairstyling and dressing process, she questions the Eurocentric and hegemonic canons of beauty, sharing her experience to foster an anti-racist drag culture in Spain while she offers beauty advice on their dismantling.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 13:00
Encounter: Anybody Walking? Dissident Bodies that Inhabit the Ballroom
Perla Naomi, Cacao Díaz and Brad Scott in Conversation
Ballroom culture originated in the USA as a necessary radical act by the LGBTQIA+, Black and Latin community to respond to discrimination. Crystal LaBeija, a Black trans woman, created the first ballroom for Black and Latin people, creating a safe space for the community, in contrast to today, where ballroom culture opens its doors to all bodies, but without forgetting their origins. In this conversation, representatives from the ballroom community in Spain and part of the Kiki House of Laveaux speak about dissident bodies that inhabit it and their roles — those that perform, those that gaze and those that inhabit the ballroom beyond the dancefloor and categories.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Teatro Accesible also supports the activity through the loan of hearing aid devices: personal magnetic induction loop systems and sound amplification with earphones.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 14:00
Community Lunch with Aires de Alondra
A collaborative, community-centred culinary experience conducted by Aires de Alondra. The initiative puts forward gastronomy and culture as a tool for dialogue and care.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 16:00
Queens at the Museum Kiki Ball
A ball is an event created within ballroom culture, with different categories of competition encompassing fields such as dance (voguing, dance-offs), fashion and the fashion show (runway, fashion killah, labels...), face and body (face, body realness) and others such as Black Hair Magic and Commentator vs Commentator. The aim is to create a space where anybody can express themselves on stage.
It sees in the spring as the Queens come together in the Museo Reina Sofía to celebrate another night of bodies that inhabit the ballroom. The space, replete with artworks, also demonstrates how you can break away from avant-gardes and stereotypes and how you can be the masterpiece that enraptures beholders.
Categories: Black Hair Magic, Fashion Killah, Washed Face, Trans Men Realness/FemmeQueen Realness with Posing, Commentator vs Commentator, OTA (Open to All) Runway, Walk for Your Sistah!, OTA (Open to All) Performance, Vogue for Your Sistah! and Dance-off.
Presented by: Perla Naomi, MC QueenBitch 007 and DJ Jourdan McDaniel Laveaux.
Jury: Godmother Koko Anunnaki, Cori Angels and Cacao Laveaux.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs on the third floor (access with lift).
Chairs are available for people who require them.
Location: Nouvel Building, Lobby
Capacity: 200 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 11:30
Encounter: Creative Processes, with Noelia Cortés
Writer Noelia Cortés reflects on the power of the imagination, story and the word to transform common imaginaries, and how the Roma people have their own voice, despite the gaze of others constantly making them create from antagonism.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Teatro Accesible also supports the activity through the loan of hearing aid devices: personal magnetic induction loop systems and sound amplification with earphones.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Presentation of projects for the Artivism against Racism competition, by the Alliance for Solidarity
Locutorio Itinerante (Itinerant Phone Box) is an installation made by Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta that draws inspiration from the phone boxes that were prevalent in the 1990s. Via a series of short stories simulating telephone calls from the daily lives of migrant people, the stress is placed on challenges and strong bonds of alliance.
Sonoridades y corpografías sagradas (Sacred Sounds and Corpographies) is a proposal by the Migrantes Transgresorxs collective and is based on a series of encounters and workshops conducted by young people. By way of podcasts, distant memories and histories of resistance interweave to create a combative counter-discourse to racist, xenophobic and LGBTI-phobic narratives.
¿Qué Mi(g)ras? Fanzine, by the ¿Qué Mi(g)ras? collective, which originates from the Artivism Laboratory, puts forward different artistic techniques to make the work of migrant and racialised artists visible. On this occasion they will present a fanzine.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 16:30
Situated Tours of the Collection
Tours of the Collection conducted by mediators from the Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation.
The situated tours are life journeys through the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, whereby situated mediators seek to appeal to the desires and needs of migrant communities. Mediation is understood as a space of knowledge production and a vehicle for welcoming anti-racist and decolonial gazes that enrich museological narratives.
Accessible activity
Wheelchair loans and folding cane seats are available to the public
Location: Sabatini Building, rooms of the Collection. Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance, Information Desk
Capacity: 40 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 19:00
Conciertos de Pleneros del Exilio y Justicieros de la Cumbia
This session places music at the heart of a proclamation of Latin American and Caribbean culture: preserving its musical community roots and transmitting a cultural legacy of rhythm and dances.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
Seats are available for those who need them.
Accessible activity with vibrating backpacks provided by Teatro Accesible, with prior request by filling out a form from SOS Racismo Madrid.
Location: Sabatini Building, rooms of the Collection. Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance, Information Desk
Capacity: 40 people
Participants
Aires de Alondra is a cultural association and family initiative that uses gastronomy and culture as tools for dialogue and care.
The ¿Qué mi(g)ras? collective came into being in 2024 from the Alliance for Solidarity’s Artivism Laboratory and puts forward different art techniques to grant visibility to the work of migrant and racialised artists.
Noelia Cortés is a poet and essayist. Her most recent publications include the poetry collection Del mar y la muerte (Editorial Cicely, 2024) and the essay La higuera de las gitanas (Ediciones en el mar, 2022), which analyses the deep-rooted anti-Romani sentiment in spaces such as feminism, culture, the media and language. Her latest work has been as a creative advisor on the documentary Farruquito, premiered in 2025.
Cacao Díaz is an artist of African descent whose practice spans different live-art and stage disciplines, constructing narratives and vibrations through the body that draw inspiration from experiences as a migrant and trans body. Díaz’s relationship with ballroom culture connects to affective communities of sexual dissidences and migrants, while the artist’s creative research focuses on recovering the stolen body, Afro-descendent rituals, transvestite fiction and performances of the body.
The Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation is a project fostered by the Museo Situado assembly and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Tentacular Museum and Education Departments, in collaboration with intercultural mediator Hanan Dalouh Amghar. Its objective is for the Museo to be a more accessible space that is mindful of the demands of the community of which it is part, geographically and affectively, understanding mediation as a space of knowledge production and a vehicle for welcoming anti-racist and decolonial gazes which enrich the narratives of the Museo’s Collections. The Situated Mediators run visits to the Museo which appeal to the desires and needs of its communities and conduct them in Spanish and other languages such as Wolof, Bengali, Darija, Arabic and French.
Justicieros de la cumbia is a music band which plays a mix of cumbia, rock, reggae, funk, with a dash of madness, creating a stage-shaking musical experience.
Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta is a political scientist and researcher.
Migrantes Transgresorxs formed in 2009 as a focal point of the LGBTI+ social movements of migrant, refugee and racialised people in Spain. The intersectional collective fights to preserve racialised lives and enhance the construction of migrant communities through encounters, workshops, actions and campaigns on human, social and cultural rights.
Perla Naomi is a trans-Indigenous-migrant artist. With a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, she works inside the framework of ballroom, opening new paths from an anti-racist, decolonial, trans and queer discourse. She has shown her work at Matadero Madrid, the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, La Parcería, the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, the Festival Ciudad Bailar, the SOS Racismo’s Anti-racist Festival in Puerta del Sol in 2019, the Boiler Room Festival, CoruFest, Noche Blanca Oviedo and Don’t Hit a la Negrx, among other art events.
Pleneros del exilio are a Madrid-based Puerto Rican band who come together to preserve idiosyncrasy. The rich musical rhythms that characterise Puerto Rico are the main vehicle they use to proclaim Latin American and Caribbean culture, taking it to stage and street.
Brad Scott was born in Venezuela and currently lives in Madrid. For the past four years, Scott has been actively involved in the ballroom community, most notably as the Princess in the House of Laveaux, as well as performing, during this period, in renowned spaces like La Casa Encendida, Matadero Madrid and Noche Blanca Oviedo.
Youssef Taki is an artist and researcher whose work encompasses, from different approaches, an understanding of migratory processes and colonial and post-colonial occurrences, analysing how they impact the present and daily life. Taki is part of the Al’Akhawat collective.
Teatro accesible is a pioneering project centred on integrating accessibility measures into theatre in Spain. It was set up in 2011 with the support of the Vodafone Foundation, the Centro de Rehabilitación Laboral Nueva Vida and the technology and accessibility company Aptent. Their approach centres on adapting plays by incorporating subtitling, audio description and sign language, as well as creating inclusive experiences such as touch tours and accessible talks for people with vision impairments.
Gad Yola is a multidisciplinary artist who, through the practice of drag, creates a critical discourse around heteronormativity and European whiteness. Born in Lima and raised in Madrid, she works to disrupt and rethink institutions, exhibition rooms and Spanish pop culture. She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and employs music and audiovisual production to express her opposition to racism and LGBTI phobia.
Más actividades
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.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.