Situated Voices 16
Another End of the World Is Possible. Examining the “New Normal”
Held on 14 oct 2020
In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. It paraphrased, with a measure of humour, the old slogan “Another world is possible”, reclaiming the right to decide our future, no matter how dark and turbulent it may seem.
As with all crises, the one caused by COVID-19 has laid bare the strengths and weakness of our societies, bringing to light, once again, the need for global and radical change to guarantee the sustainability of life.
Another End of the World Is Possible. Examining the “New Normal” puts forward an open conversation to address how we imagine other possible futures to the backdrop of a new post-COVID society. What have we learned or are learning from this crisis? What changes are occurring? What world do we want to build? Is the normal we aspire to return to, post-lockdown, part of the problem? What alternatives are considered with regard to the old and new normal in relation to healthcare, care, ecology, the economy, work, education, culture and life itself?
These premises will be debated in a virtual encounter, with each participant offering their perspective on the proposed subject, before leading on to an interactive debate. The activity will be moderated by translator, researcher and activist Marta Malo, and will feature the participation of Santiago Alba Rico, a philosopher, writer and essayist; Rosa Bajo, a primary healthcare doctor and advocate of rights in the universal access to health services; and Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian feminist activist and environmentalist.
Programme
Situated Voices
Force line
Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by
Museo Situado
Times:
Madrid, Spain – 6pm
Tunis, Tunisia – 5pm
Bogotá, Colombia – 11am
Participants
Santiago Alba Rico is a writer and essayist with a philosophy degree from Madrid’s Complutense University. In the 1980s, he was a screenwriter on Spain’s legendary television programme La bola de cristal (The Crystal Ball) and has published in excess of twenty books on politics, philosophy and literature, in addition to three children’s stories and a stage play. Since 1988, he has lived in the Arab world, translating Egyptian poet Naguib Surur and Iraqi novelist Mohammed Jydair into Spanish. He is also a regular contributor with different media outlets.
Rosa Bajo is a primary healthcare doctor and an activist who advocates a non-discriminatory national health system that provides universal care. She supports the right to access healthcare and is an instructor in basic notions of care for communities excluded from the healthcare system. Her most recent work has been carried out in the Lavapiés Health Centre in Madrid.
Marta Malo is a translator, researcher and activist, and coordinator of the book Nociones Comunes. Ensayos y experiencias entre investigación y militancia (Traficantes de Sueños, 2004). She has been involved in different collective and militant research initiatives with the aim of activating communities, combatting inequality and defending the commons. The transformation of care in a neoliberal context is one of her main concerns. She has been involved in different practical essays, most notably Precarias a la deriva (Madrid, 2002–2006).
Francia Márquez is an Afro-Colombian human rights activist and environmentalist who was part of the delegation to negotiate Peace Agreements in Colombia. She is currently chairperson of the National Council of Peace, Reconciliation and Co-existence (CNPRC). From 2013 to 2016 she was a legal representative for the Community Council of the afro-descendent communities of La Toma. In 2014, she participated in the so-called “March of the Turbans” to demand the end of illegal mining and land occupation, and the Black Women’s Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Land, for which she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018.
Marta Pérez is a professor at Madrid’s Complutense University and Duke University. She participates in the movement Yo Sí Sanidad Universal (Yes to Universal Healthcare), which has been creating ways to build universal healthcare since 2012. Her research centres around health and territory, the healthcare system and access, and around possible struggles and institutional forms to ensure the right to health. This work is carried out with the precarious balance between the university and the outside, primarily with the militant research collective Entrar Afuera (Enter Outside). Moreover, she is part of the Training School for Women Promoters of Community Health with Red Interlavapiés (the Interlavapiés Network), Senda de Cuidados (Path to Care), Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory), Red Solidaria de Acogida (Refuge Solidarity Network), Yo Sí Sanidad Universal (Yes to Universal Healthcare) and Museo Situado (Situated Museum).
![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.