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
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.