Situated Voices 13
Surviving Together. Community Organisation in Times of Pandemic
Held on 24 jun 2020
The COVID-19 health crisis, isolation and the shutdown of economic activity imposed by the state of emergency have brought to the surface and exacerbated the precarious nature of many lives: old people living alone, people attempting to make ends meet in the underground economy, others having to endure confinement in poor living conditions or without a roof over their heads, irregular migrants, families with no means to cover their rent or utility and food bills…
Faced with this emergency situation, care networks made up of hundreds of volunteers, associations and neighbourhood initiatives have mobilised to co-care for families, groups and people in situations of vulnerability, connecting and appealing to those who can help alleviate urgent and neglected needs and underscoring solidarity-based action in pursuit of community survival.
Surviving Together. Community Organisation in Times of Pandemic sets out to constitute a reflection based on an open conversation around specific forms of resistance, cooperation, self-management, and community solidarity in different places framed in the context of the capitalist crisis and the current health emergency.
This virtual encounter is moderated by Pepa Torres, a resident and activist from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, and features the participation of Jorge Bolaños, chairman of the Dragones Sports Club in Lavapiés, one of the associations propelling the La CuBa Platform (Lavapiés, Caring for the Neighbourhood) food bank; Kat Fernández, a Peruvian feminist activist; Daniela Maldonado, a community spokesperson, artist and social activist in the trans community in Bogotá; Fatoumata Souratié, an activist from the Burkina Faso political movement Le Balai Citoyen; and Cristina Vega, a research professor whose work centres on an analysis of work, reproduction and care.
Programa
Voces situadas
Línea-fuerza
Acción e imaginación radical
Organised by
Museo Situado
Participants
Jorge Bolaños is a journalist with a PhD in Social and Legal Sciences and chairman of the Dragones Sports Club in Lavapiés, Madrid, a football association that uses sport to bring together and integrate migrant children and families at risk of social exclusion and which, together with other neighbourhood associations such as Teatro del Barrio, Red de Cuidados Madrid Centro, and Micro para el Sáhara, and local residents, supports the La CuBa Platform (Lavapiés, Caring for the Neighbourhood), a food bank which surfaced during the health emergency caused by COVID-19, distributing essential items to over 500 families.
Kat Fernández is an activist in Popular Feminisms, a libertarian, and the daughter of Peruvian Andes immigrants. At the present time, she is situated on the outskirts of Lima and committed to labour union struggles in relation to itinerant female workers, neighbourhood self-organisation and the right to decide. She is an advocate of the Andean world view, feminist accompaniment, huayno, solidarity, self-management, self-defence and Ayllu living. Furthermore, she is a member of Compromiso (Commitment), an autonomous and working-class feminist collective which aims to provide in-person and virtual accompaniment related to abortion, taking into consideration economic, class and racial differences in the access to information.
Daniela Maldonado Salamanca is a community spokesperson, artist and activist in the trans community in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, and founder and director of Red Comunitaria Trans (Trans Community Network), in the Santa Fe neighbourhood in the same city. Her experience and knowledge are focused on community-based work with LGBTI sectors of the population — particularly the transgender population in situations of vulnerability, for instance sex workers, psychoactive substance users and the homeless — rooted in strategies of social and artistic participation and legal tools to defend the rights of the trans population. Since the start of the pandemic, the Network has founded the Fondo de Emergencia para Trabajadoras Sexuales (Emergency Fund for Sex Workers), and other initiatives, to alleviate the violence and discrimination towards trans people which have become more pronounced since the start of the COVID-19 health emergency.
Fatoumata Souratié studied Biochemistry and is a teacher at a private secondary school in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as well as a member of the National Coordination of Le Balai Citoyen (The Citizen’s Broom), a civil society collective working for the country’s democratic culture, social justice, and transparency in public administration. This movement, present in twenty-eight cities in Burkina Faso, came into being in 2013, putting forward the “sweeping out” of political corruption with actions of community development as a metaphor for social self-sufficiency, with its members carrying symbolic brooms during protests. Through the campaign Ne pas paniquer, ne pas banaliser (Do not Panic, Do not Trivialise), and in the COVID-19 situation, they call for calm and compliance with the indications of the health authorities and seek to raise awareness among the population of the measures to follow.
Pepa Torres is a philologist, social educator and a resident in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, where she is an activist with diverse migrant and feminist collectives: Red Interlavapiés, Territorio Doméstico and Senda de cuidados. She is currently part of the committee "Alimentando el barrio” (Feeding the Neighbourhood), which emerged in Lavapiés amidst the COVID-19 crisis.
Cristina Vega has been a research professor at the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Latin American University of Social Studies (FLACSO), Ecuador, since 2011, and is coordinator of its PhD in Sociology (2020–2023). She is also part of the Ecuadorian feminist collective Flor de Guanto. Her research centres on Gender Studies, focusing on an analysis of work, reproduction and care. At the present time she is conducting a gender-based study of reactionary advances.
![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.