Reasons and Hate. Phobic Logics in and towards LGBTIAQ+ Collectives
Round-table Discussion
Held on 07 jul 2023
Hate and fear run through our bodies, minds, actions and discourses in different ways and from different angles as a symptom and consequence of violence which is inherited and reactivated in the present. Today, we are witness to spiralling phobia which tends to flood social space, driving out difference and stopping other types of affects from germinating.
This round-table discussion features the participation of Ballet Djédje, Demetrio Gómez, Elena Prous, Tatiana Romero Reina and Iki Yos Piña, the voices of different agents hit hard by these logics of hate and fear and who refuse to assume the role of victim that pushes them aside and threatens to absorb the energy and capacity to evolve and build other ways of relating.
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Ballet Djédjé is a queer writer and PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research is centred on the experiences of African homosexual people on the African continent and in Europe, racism in the gay community in Europe and the deconstruction of discourses on homosexuality in Africa. He is the author of How to Love Yourself as a Gay Man in Africa? (2023), a self-help book published independently which offers advice on loving oneself and self-acceptance, coming out, homosexuality, faith and sexual health.
Demetrio Gómez is an activist who works for human rights and intersectionality and is recognised internationally among the Romany people. His work is also approached, transversally, from an inclusive, intersectional, decolonial and queer perspective. He has worked as an expert and trainer in the Council of Europe, the European Commission and different non-governmental organisations and international institutions centred on anti-racist activism and the fight against xenophobia. He is the founder of the Federation of Gypsy Youth Associations in Spain (Jachivela) and the Forum of European Roma Young People (FERYP), and has been on the Board of Trustees of the International Foundation of Human Rights and the European LGBTIAQ+ Romany Platform. He is the president of VERVERIPEN, Rroms for Diversity.
Elena Prous is an activist and columnist. Trained in nursing (2006), she has been part of the Independent Life Movement (MVI) since 2010. Through the body and performance, she works on functional diversity, for instance in Aguanta tú que puedes (You Can Withstand), a piece that was part of the 8th Contemporary Art Biennial – ONCE Foundation (2022). She is a contributor to publications such as La Madeja, Pikara Magazine, Diario.es and El Salto, and has taught training courses and consultancy on the realities facing people viewed as having disabilities in different institutions like Tabakalera – International Centre of Contemporary Culture in Donostia-San Sebastián, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Complutense University of Madrid. She currently writes the blog Laincontenida.com.
Tatiana Romero Reina holds a degree in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and an MA in Twentieth-Century History in Europe from Humboldt University in Berlin. She specialises in the history of women, gender relations and sex-gender dissidence and studies aspects related to contemporary history with an intersectional perspective. In recent years, her work has revolved around the migration experience, and she has spent over fifteen years as an anti-racist and transfeminist activist via workshops and training programmes. She is the co-founder of Grupo Kollontai, and works with Pikara Magazine, Feminopraxis and El Salto. She recently coordinated the volume (h)amor8 gordo, published by Continta Me Tienes in 2023.
Iki Yos Piña Narváez are an untamed fugitive, writer, performer and draughtsperson from the Caribbean. They investigate anti-colonial archives and sexual dissidence, Black memories of the Caribbean and spirituality and are part of the Ayllu collective, Cooperativa Periferia Cimarrona and the experimental group of radical Black thought In the Wake, from the Conciencia Afro space. They have contributed to publications such as Devuélvannos el oro. Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales (Colectivo Ayllu, 2018), No existe sexo sin racialización (Colectivo Ayllu, 2017), (h)amor6 trans (Continta Me Tienes, 2021), and Futuro Ancestral (Pensare Cartonera, 2022), among others. Their creations are also part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection and they have participated in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Frestas – Art Triennial in Brazil (2021) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2022).
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Comisariado
Jesús Carrillo
Organiza
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.