Neighbourhood Picnic
Our Lives Stand Opposite Their Wars. From Lavapiés to the World
Neighbourhood Picnic. Re-enchanting Lavapiés, Museo Reina Sofía Garden, 2023. Photograph: Adriana Fernández García
Date and time
Held on 08 jun 2024
Once again, for another year, the Museo Situado assembly invites all residents and communities from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood to pervade the Museo Reina Sofía, inhabiting its spaces and transforming its Garden at the Neighbourhood Picnic. In short, a chance to encounter, celebrate and vindicate the struggles, rights and desires that mobilise them every day.
Before a hegemonic economic, political and cultural system which, paraphrasing anthropologist and eco-feminist Yayo Herrero, has waged war on life, this sixth edition of the Neighbourhood Picnic is a call to reaffirm lives opposite the armed conflicts spreading around the world and the systemic violence and injustices which perforate all aspects of society. Thus, under the slogan Our Lives Stand Opposite Their Wars. From Lavapiés to the World, this day stresses the urgent need to re-situate life at the centre of everything, recognising the framework of interdependencies and mutual care that will allow us to advance towards common horizons.
The protests and campaigns that structure the day fall within three main strands. Firstly, Against All Borders, which denounces the physical and symbolic barriers that limit rights and exercise different forms of violence, condensing initiatives such as Regularisation Now; No to the European Pact on Migration and Asylum (PEMA); Against Police Violence in Lavapiés; Homeless Census. Voter Registration for All; and the campaign to make the professional illnesses of domestic and care workers more visible.
The second strand, The Right to Decent Housing for All, rallies the defence of the Lavapiés neighbourhood to oppose real estate speculation, gentrification and the escalation of tourism that drives out and evicts local residents.
Thirdly and finally, We Are Diverse, LGTBIQA+ Pride is a call to keep on spotlighting and defending the rights of sex-gender dissidences that inhabit, care for and make the neighbourhood, and with causes that denote a scream for freedom against a heteropatriarchal system and hate speech.
Organised by
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11am – 2pm Meeting point: Nouvel Building, main entrance
Kids’ Picnic
Gymkhana in the Museo
Games for children between the ages 6 of 13, organised by the collectives Hola Vecinas and Esta es una plaza.Play centre
A space for games and workshops aimed at children between the ages 6 of 13, organised by the collectives Hola Vecinas and Esta es una plaza.
In collaboration with: Escuela Savia and Savia with Tiān Mǎ Xíng Kōng. -
11:30am – 6pm Meeting point: Nouvel Building, main entrance
Situated Visits
Thirty-minute tours around the Collection by mediators from the Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation Recorridos de 30 minutos por la Colección a cargo de l+s mediador+s de la Escuela de mediación situada Aissatou Ndiaye.
11:30am, in Bengali
12pm, in Spanish
1pm, in Wolof
5pm, in Darija -
12pm – 2pm Nouvel Building, Study Centre, Classroom 2
Wikipedia and Iberian Blackness. Publishing Workshop
FormAn encounter aimed at sparking creativity and improving Wikipedia content on people and concepts related to Blackness. Tania Safura Adam Mogne, from the Black Spain project, and Silvia Ramírez, from La Parcería, will participate in the workshop, which is organised with Wikimedia España inside the framework of the Seminar Black Iberian Studies from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, Connective Tissue.
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5pm - 6:30pm Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
Capitalism's War Against Reproduction. Palestine and Beyond
Encounter with Silvia Federici
Online platformEncounter with philosopher and feminist activist Silvia Federici, organised by Museo Situado and La Laboratoria. The Space for Feminist Research.
Evening snack organised by Tómate Algo and Valiente Bangla in the Sabatini Building Garden from 6pm
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6pm – 9pm Meeting point: Sabatini Building, main entrance
Play Centre
A space for play and workshops, facilitated by Esta es Una Plaza
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7pm – 8pm Sabatini Building, main entrance and Garden
The Political-Performative Actions of the Museo Situado Collectives
—Supported by Fanfarria Transfeminista
7pm Activation of the strand Against All Borders
In a context where physical and symbolic barriers are proliferating around the world, this activation shows its support for the campaigns Regularisation Now; No to the European Pact on Migration and Asylum (PEMA); Against Police Violence in Lavapiés; Homeless Census. Voter Registration for All and advocates the recognition of the professional illnesses of domestic and care workers. y reivindica el reconocimiento de las enfermedades profesionales de las trabajadoras del hogar y cuidados.7:15pm Activation of the strand The Right to Decent Housing for All
Opposite a real estate model that is changing and posing a threat to Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, collectives and local residents speak out against evictions, speculation and the urgent need to guarantee access to decent housing.7:30pm Activation of the strand We Are Diverse, LGTBIQA+ Pride
With the advance of the far right and hate speech, there is a need to keep on defending the rights of LGTBIQA+ people and collectives. This activation vindicates the pride of sex-gender dissidences that rebel against the heteropatriarchal system. -
7:45pm – 10pm Sabatini Building, main entrance and Garden
Live Music and Dance
With the MCs Dolores Galindo and Abdoulaye Thiaw
7:45pm Welcome conducted by Amanda de la Garza (deputy artistic director of the Museo Reina Sofía) and Lucía López (Hola Vecinas)
8pm Recognition for students from Museo Situado Schools
8:15pm Presentation of Bollywood Dance Dostana
8:30pm Kulumbá
9pm La Tom son
![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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
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.
![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.