Held on 25 abr, 09, 16, 23, 30 may, 06 jun 2023
Propelled jointly from Museo Situado and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area, in collaboration with intercultural mediators Hanan Dalouh Amghar and Marlene Gildemeister, The School of Situated Mediation is a project which sets out to reflect upon the notion of “the situated” applied to cultural mediation and research into alternative practices of mediation which are mindful of the specific local context of the Museo: the Lavapiés neighbourhood. The endeavour continues the strand of work already under way with the School of Rights and Spanish Language School for the Migrant Population workshops, also previously hosted by the Museo.
Processes of cultural mediation are debated, designed and implemented across seven sessions with a group of ten people with migrant-life pathways who develop their own journeys and accompanying narratives. Thus, it opens up the chance of offering visits to the Museo which meet the desires and needs of communities that have trouble connecting to it up close, largely owing to the symbolic, material and cultural barriers they encounter in gaining access.
These visits also adapt to the languages of the different migrant communities in Madrid, neighbourhood associations and collectives that are part of the Museo Situado assembly and everyone with an interest in reflecting on migration from cultural institutions. The trained mediators from this school will conduct museum visits in Spanish and other languages, such as Wolof, Bengali, Dariya, Arabic and French.
With a methodology of collaborative and horizontal work, The School of Situated Mediation offers tools to make the Museo a more accessible space, one which is perceptive of the demands of the community within it, both geographically and affectively and with mediation understood as a space to produce knowledge, not as a service tool.
Hanan Dalouh Amghar is an intercultural social mediator and a translator-interpreter in Arabic, Dariya and Berber languages. She studied Intercultural Social Mediation at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and Forced Migration: Strategies of Psychosocial Support at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), as well as earning an MA in Immigration, Asylum and Intercommunity Relations from UAM. As an activist, she is a human rights advocate with a commitment to feminisms.
María Ángeles Fernández Páez is an artist and researcher who is part of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Mediation team. She holds a degree in Fine Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), the latter in a collaboration with the Autonomous University of Madrid and Museo Reina Sofía. She is currently studying a PhD in Fine Arts at UCM, where she also conducts research into new emotional politics in the technosphere.
Marlene Gildemeister is a mother, an anti-racist feminist, cross-border mixed race, a counter-academic, an artisan, an educator and a social archaeologist in a constant process of decolonisation. She holds an MA in Specific Didactics in Classrooms, Museums and Natural Spaces from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).
Coordinated by
Hanan Dalouh Amghar (Zaidan Association)
Participants
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
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.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.