Madrecitas. Mothers’ Right to Raise and Care for Their Children
Institutional Violence against Racialised Mothers and Children
The La Llorona performance by Linda Porn and Frida Trejo in Muestra Fervor, Barcelona, 2024. Fotograph: Alfonso Blanco
Fotograph: Alfonso Blanco
This encounter aims to spotlight how institutional, gender-based violence is more severe for migrant and/or racialised women by way of audiovisual pieces, a performance and spaces of debate and discussion.
The violence inflicted on the body of these mothers is never straightforward: a brutal compendium of violence driven by institutional racism and the judicialisation and criminalisation of non-Eurocentric motherhood. The Madrecitas collective has devoted many years to denouncing rights violations and institutional violence migrant mothers and their descendants have been subjected to in the Spanish State. As asserted by one of the collective’s members and activists, Mel de Lima, doubt is constantly cast over the right of migrant mothers to raise and care for their children, challenging their parenting capacities via legal persecution over their irregular administrative situation.
This situation highlights the urgent need to work collectively for an anti-racist feminism, whereby the intersection of these forms of violence is made manifest. Consequently, the encounter begins by displaying four audiovisual pieces which reflect legal approaches and the experiences of migrant mothers, followed by an afternoon session featuring the performance La Llorona (Weeping Woman) by artists Linda Porn and Frida Trejo. This stage and audiovisual work explores the institutional, patriarchal and colonial violence incited through racism, misogyny and maternaphobia that affects racialised and impoverished mothers and minors by deconstructing the myth of La Llorona (Weeping Woman), created during the colonial period in New Spain, today’s Mexico.
This activity joins the social demands, endorsed from the Museo’s Tentacular Museum, that advocate for an advance in public policies from an anti-racist perspective to protect children and women.
A childcare space run by Maestras del Barrio is available, by filling out a registration form beforehand, in the morning and afternoon sessions of the encounter.
With the support of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Madrecitas
Agenda
sábado 08 feb 2025 a las 11:30
Presentation and Madrecitas Audiovisual Pieces
sábado 08 feb 2025 a las 12:30
Racialised Children and Mothers Persecuted in the Spanish State
— Discussion between Mel de Lima, Tamara Fernández, Carolina Meloni and Nora Rugama
sábado 08 feb 2025 a las 17:00
La Llorona, performance by Linda Porn and Frida Trejo
sábado 08 feb 2025 a las 18:00
Discussion between Linda Porn, Frida Trejo and Adilia de las Mercedes
Participants
Tamara Fernández is a practising lawyer who specialises in institutional violence in children’s care centres.
Mel de Lima is a mother-activist, a human rights advocate for racialised women and children and a member of the Madrecitas Association.
Madrecitas Association is an association made up of migrant women who denounce the violation of human rights and institutional violence against migrant women and their descendants.
Carolina Meloni is a transfeminist philosopher, writer, researcher and activist specialised in anti-colonialism.
Adilia de las Mercedes (Spain-Guatemala) is a lawyer specialised in anti-discriminatory law at DEMOS, the Legal Office of Human Rights, and director of the Women of Guatemala Association (AMG).
Linda Porn is a visual artist, actress, sex worker, single mother and a graduate from the Teatro Campesino e Indígena in Mexico. Her work has been shown at numerous museums, for instance MoMA in New York, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), as well as at multiple film and theatre festivals in different European countries.
Nora Rugama is a psychologist specialised in sexual and institutional violence and also a member of the Women of Guatemala Association (AMG).
Frida Trejo is an actress, visual artist and cinematographer who has worked with the company Los Menos Teatro.
A childcare space run by Maestras del Barrio is available, by filling out a registration form beforehand, in the morning and afternoon sessions of the encounter.
![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)
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Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
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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.
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The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
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.
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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?
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The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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