Held on 11 May 2022
Neighbourhood memories belong to the inhabitants — their situated experiences, relationships, celebrations, conflicts and traumas — the spaces they occupy, mutual support networks and struggles to improve both their lives and their environment.
Certain neighbourhoods, displaced and marginalised by gentrification, are left behind by institutions, which omit and drive apart the memories of these territories. In breaking up collective histories and, as a result, decontextualising them to foster speculative policies, community frameworks are dispersed and the most vulnerable residents are driven out of territories.
To offset this, practices of memory create processes of social cohesion around places and landmarks that are anchored strongly in the bodies of residents and in their affections and relationships. They also produce an archive, a powerful resource for co-existence and for struggles to be upheld.
In this edition of Situated Voices dialogue takes place around the different experiences and strategies of collective memory, from the certainty that producing and caring for neighbourhood memories is essential for improving the living conditions of people that inhabit them.
La Digitalizadora de la Memoria Colectiva is a citizen platform located in Seville and made up of audiovisual, archive and IT professionals who work with collectives and individuals to preserve their audiovisual memory recorded in analogue formats.
LaFundició is a cooperative which came into being in 2006 in the Bellvitge neighbourhood (L’Hospitalet, Barcelona) and drives forward collective process of knowledge, cultural practices and forms of relationships, understood as commonly used resources and as “controversial” and situated activities. LaFundició also sets forth a critique of job insecurity in the cultural sphere and puts forward more horizontal and fairer ways of working via ongoing collaboration with different action groups and organisations.
Ana Longoni is a writer and researcher who has propelled the Southern Conceptualisms Network since it was founded. She is also the former director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Public Activities. With a PhD in the Arts from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), she specialises in the crossroads between art and politics in Argentina and Latin America from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day. She is currently part of the team of curators for the exhibition Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, held in the Museo Reina Sofía from 18 May to 13 October.
Ana Sánchez Mina is a researcher. From a perspective of militant commitment, she traces political experiences, reflecting on the current forms of resistance to neoliberalism, the creation and mix of open languages and spaces and connections for the commons. Her political and life interests are tied to urban resistance, experiences of self-organisation, self-management and social economy, as well as feminist struggles and gazes. Her political experience is rooted primarily in the last two decades of struggle in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, and she is currently developing research around the memory of the El Laboratorio social centre, a self-managed endeavour which took place in Lavapiés between 1997 and 2003.
Sindicato de manteros de Madrid is an association which represents street vendors and aims to defend their rights and denounce structural racism.
Organised by
GRIGRI, Museo Situado and the Postory Research Group - Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)
Collaboration
Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)
Programme
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Organised by
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Participants
Más actividades
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.