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
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.