Held on 12 jun 2021
At a time when our reality is a climate and health emergency, the void left by the sense of collectiveness, the devaluation of communal living, cutbacks to public services and the ever-present privatisation of life, Grigri Projects and SERCADE (with its project Programme Afrique) put forward, in line with Museo Situado’s manifesto Facing a Clamour that Cannot Be Ignored: The Ethics of Catastrophe, a common space from which to collectively think about community living in the city of Madrid. The project is supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.
As a medicine cabinet well stocked with first aid material, the project looks to delve deeper into the conception of care with the help of ideas and useful resources to identify what is good for us collectively and to open pathways that allow us to live differently. All of this is mutually understood with the knowledge, particularly migrant knowledge, and experiences of people who inhabit this collectiveness in the search for a multicultural community neighbourhood with shared future perspectives.
The programme A Medicine Cabinet for My City is made up of six workshops and two bespoke guided tours to be carried out in spaces inside the Museo Reina Sofía, SERCADE, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Medialab Prado from 6 May to 12 June, culminating in an open session for the general public.
The sessions are organised around three hubs, from which a commons map is articulated. The first focuses on the places in which participants feel at home (and feel uncomfortable), as well as people who, through care, have determined their lives. The second axis is related to the currents established from the paths that make up their daily lives in the city, involving accessible and inaccessible places, with an outline of each circumstance. The third and final hub alludes to times in which certain spaces and people provide, via different ties, a sense of belonging. This themed tour is enhanced by Yannick Tresor Dzouko Komgang, an intercultural mediator, volunteer and interpreter at SERCADE, Adam Hassane Saleh, a contributor with Grigri Pixel, and the Grigri Projects residencies programme, workshops and seminars, and Susana Moliner and David Pérez, both part of the Grigri Projects team.
The final session in the programme, open to the general public and held in the Museo Reina Sofía, displays the results to come out of previous encounters, offering a “first-aid kit” framed inside a conversation between philosopher Marina Garcés and theologist and activist Pepa Torres. Furthermore, the event is part of the activities organised around the Museo Reina Sofía’s Neighbourhood Picnic.
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She is a degree and MA lecturer in Art and Humanities Studies at the Open University of Catalonia, and has steered her career towards the practical, critical and collective thought she develops from Espai en Blanc. Her publications most notably include En las prisiones de lo posible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and Escola d'aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).
Grigri projects is a platform centred around research, creation and cultural production, acting in participatory design, urban intervention and transdisciplinary community processes, in collaboration with other local and international collectives and agents.
SERCADE. The Capuchin Service for Development and Solidarity is a non-profit association that has channelled social action developed by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin since 1998. Its social work is deployed in programmes with vulnerable collectives, projects of collaboration and cooperation among other organisations from national and international spheres, denouncement actions in the media and on social networks, and in initiatives to advocate an appreciation of disadvantaged collectives.
Pepa Torres is a philologist, social educator and a resident in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, where she is an activist with collectives of migrant and feminist struggles: Red Interlavapiés, Senda de cuidados and Territorio Doméstico.
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![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
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.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
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.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.