Held on 26 nov 2020
The collective imaginary and information around the propagation and spread of COVID-19 have radically changed the way we relate to one another, so much so that we perceive encounters with others as a threat. Where does this leave the need to hug, touch and smell one another? How does this situation alter our sexual practices? What new imaginaries shape the current private and public sphere? What drifts will be brought about by mandatory social distancing, curfews and hidden encounters?
This conversation addresses aspects such as desire, contact and risk in times of social distancing, with a primary goal of collectively questioning and re-situating the body as a place of interaction from distant voices, ties and practices.
Pleasure Surfaces picks up on the title of an album by Argentinian band Virus recorded in 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic — a disease that affected Federico Moura, the singer, and Daniel Melgarejo, illustrator of the album cover, which displays ambiguous naked blue buttocks. If HIV and AIDS led to a pronounced stigmatisation of non-normative sexual practices, then COVID-19 appears to have, socially speaking, reinstated a climate of fear, condemnation and persecution.
This online encounter is moderated by professor and researcher Nicolás Cuello and features the participation of activist and sex worker Beyoncé; teacher and researcher Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky; writer, poet and journalist Gabriela Wiener; and audiovisual producer and researcher Lucas Disalvo.
Programme
Situated Voices
Force line
Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by
Museo Situado
Access: Free
Times:
Madrid, Spain – 6pm
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 2pm
Participants
Beyoncé is a trans activist, migrant and street sex worker. Her struggles focus on the rights of female sex workers, specifically transexual women, and, in alignment with her activist and resistance-based positions, she is co-founder of Agrupación Feminista de Trabajadoras del Sexo (Feminist Group of Sex Workers, AFEMTRAS)
Nicolás Cuello is a professor and researcher. A research fellow at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET), a lecturer at the National University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, and secretary on the Free Chair “Artistic Practices, Sexual Politics”, he is also a founding member of Archivo de Culturas Subterráneas (Archive of Underground Cultures), an archive and classification project for independent cultural productions, and editor of the newspaper La Protesta Sexual. His research centres on the intersection of artistic practices with sexual politics, critical representations of emotions and underground graphic art cultures from the post-dictatorship period in Argentina to the present.
Lucas Disalvo is an audiovisual producer, researcher and teacher with a post-doctoral fellowship at University of La Plata, where he also earned a degree in Audiovisual Arts. Alongside Nicolás Cuello, he co-edited the book Críticas sexuales a la razón punitiva. Insumos para seguir imaginando una vida junt*s (Ediciones Precarias, 2018) and is co-author of Ninguna línea recta. Contraculturas punk y políticas sexuales en Argentina 1984-2007 (Alcohol & Fotocopias/Tren en Movimiento, 2019). His work focuses on trans studies in pornography, sexual and visual politics, fandom cultures, perverse spectatorship, and transformative textual practices, etc.
Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky is a teacher and researcher. In 2017, he received a grant from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) to work on a residency of training and research in the Programme of Independent Studies (PIE) and in 2019 received a research and innovation grant in Visual Arts from the Regional Government of Catalonia. Moreover, he has participated and collaborated in putting on different exhibitions in the sphere of art and culture, for example Dislocated Archive (MACBA, 2017) and Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action (MACBA, 2018).
Gabriela Wiener is a writer, poet and journalist who has published the following books: Nueve lunas (Marea Editorial, 2009), Llamada perdida (Malpaso, 2014), Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu (La Bella Varsovia, 2014), Sexografías (Seix Barral, 2015) and Dicen de mí (Esto no es Berlín, 2018), all of which have been translated into different languages. She also writes for an array of publications and newspapers, for instance La República, El Salto, El País and The New York Times Spanish edition. She is currently working on a piece she wrote and stars in: Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti (Falling in Love with You Is Madness) in Teatro del Barrio, Madrid.
![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.