Situated Voices 24
Between Dreams and Deceits: Trafficking as a Form of Slavery in the 21st Century
Held on 16 jun 2022
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forced migration of millions of people, particularly women and girls, has once again become a pressing issue that reignites the debate around human trafficking and the situations that cause it. In many cases, migration and exile lead to many people, particularly young people and minors, being kidnapped or disappearing involuntarily as they try to flee situations of violence and extreme poverty. Their life stories cross over in trafficking networks which take advantage of a lack of rights and protection in countries of the Global North to abuse and exploit them through this form of slavery in the 21st century.
The 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, drafted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), exposes how sexual exploitation remains the main target of global traffickers (in 50% of identified cases), with women and girls representing 65% of victims and the greatest risk factors traffickers exploit related to financial needs, irregular migratory conditions, family conflicts (particularly in the case of teenagers) and emotional dependency with the trafficker as a support mechanism.
This edition of Situated Voices looks to reflect on the different problems people being trafficked face, exploring the causes and consequences and stressing the urgent need to create public policies to support and protect them.
Inmaculada Antolínez is an anthropologist and professor in the Department of Employment Law and Social Security at the University of Cádiz. An expert in issues related to human trafficking, she has participated in different research and international cooperation projects on the migration of women from Sub-Saharan Africa. This research has led her to carry out creative work with Esperanza Jorge Barbujano, for instance the ethnographic documentary Irioweniasi. El hilo de la luna (2018), the touring group exhibition Mujeres que caminan mundo en los márgenes de la vida (2021) and the illustrated book Decálogo de Huellas (2021), working as co-authors with Akhere Monday.
Margarita Escamilla has been a professor of Criminal Law since 2008 and teaches Criminal Law and Criminology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her main line of research centres on the criminalisation of migrants and refugees, and the use of criminal and sanction law in managing human mobility. Today, she is head researcher on the project Exclusión social y sistema penal y penitenciario. Análisis y propuestas sobre tres realidades: migración y refugio, enfermedad mental y prisión, and has published numerous scientific works, technical reports and informative articles.
Patricia Fernández Vicens is a human rights advocate specialised in children, migratory issues and asylum. She works as a lawyer for the Neighbourhood Coordinator from the San Carlos Borromeo parish and La Merced Migraciones Foundation in Madrid. Furthermore, she is part of Red Solidaria de Acogida to support the rights of refugee and migrant people.
Tania García Sedano holds a PhD from Carlos III University in Madrid and is a writer, researcher and national and international advisor. A criminal law and human rights expert, she works as an alternate magistrate at Madrid’s Provincial Court and is an associate professor of Criminal Law at Carlos III University. She has also been an advisor to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on contemporary forms of slavery. She is the author of three monographs and over thirty articles related to penal issues and fundamental rights.
Helena Maleno is a human rights activist, journalist, researcher, documentary-maker and writer from Spain. A specialist in migrations and human trafficking, she founded the Caminando Fronteras collective. She has lived in Morocco since 2011, from where she denounces the human rights violations on Spain’s southern border and works to support and empower Sub-Saharan migrant communities in the migration process.
Organised by
GRIGRI, Museo Situado and Red Solidaria de Acogida
Programme
Inside the framework of
Participants
Participants
![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)
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The show casts light on the close relationship Uslé’s work bears to his life experiences, establishing connections between different stages and series which could ostensibly seem distant. Framed in this context, the conversation looks to explore the artist’s personal and professional journey: his memories, experiences of New York, his creative process, conception of painting, and ties with photography and film, and the cohesiveness and versatility that characterise his art. Key aspects for a more in-depth understanding of his artistic sphere.
The conversation, moreover, spotlights the preparatory research process that has given rise to this exhibition to grant a better understanding of the curatorial criteria and decisions that have guided its development.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Fifteenth Edition of the Márgenes Festival
Sunday, 23 November 2025 - 7:30pm
This year’s opening night of the fifteenth edition of the Márgenes International Contemporary Film Festival will take place inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The inaugural session will witness artists Neutro Gris and Nodoaviom perform, live and for the first time, the multimedia performance Music 4 Salvation, which extends their language towards a sensorial experience fusing sound, image and digital emotion.
Music 4 Salvation unfolds as a sound and visual collage in which different strands are linked in one sole narrative of youth and adulthood, notions from which the piece puts forward a second reading of popular symbology and iconography and culminates by evoking the transitional time between these two stages of life. And all from a post-internet gaze and found footage aesthetics.
The Márgenes Festival is held from 23 to 30 November in Madrid and shines a light on innovative initiatives that combine up-and-coming and acclaimed talent. Its film programme explores the convergence of cinema, the visual arts and sound art with approaches that expand the limits of the film experience, encompassing screenings, audiovisual shows, performances, encounters and sessions for children. In addition to the opening event, the Museo also welcomes, among the organised activities this year, the series Emotional Interface. The Films of Metahaven.
The Films of Ira Sachs
From Thursday, 20, to Sunday, 23 November 2025 – Check times
The International Festival of LGBTQIA+ Cinema in Madrid (QueerCineMad) and the Museo Reina Sofía come together to organise a retrospective on Ira Sachs (USA, 1965), a pivotal film-maker in contemporary queer cinema whose work has charted, across three decades, the affects, losses and resistance that traverse the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. Sachs is the creator of a filmography which conceives of New York as the emotional architecture of his narratives, and as a space of memory, struggle and community. This programme includes the premiere of his most recent film, Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), in Madrid, with the film-maker in attendance in three of its sessions.
Sachs has filmed, with delicacy and conviction, the tensions between desire, precarity and belonging, from his first feature-length film, The Delta (1996), set on the margins of the Mississippi, to Love Is Strange (2014), where a gay couple have to give up their Manhattan apartment after marrying. In Keep the Lights On (2012) intimacy becomes a battleground in confronting addiction and neglect, while Lady (1994), a short film on the solitude of an elderly woman in New York, anticipates his sensibility for bodies made invisible. Last Address (2010) is a silent homage to queer artists who died from AIDS/HIV-related illnesses — Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz — whereby the façades of the buildings they lived in become intimate monuments, the remnants of history erased through windows. Thus, Ira Sachs’s body of work engages in a profound dialogue with film-makers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder in situating the gaze at the centre of bodies, in exploring the complexity of the struggle between himself and his films. Further, his practice reverberates through New Queer Cinema, a 1990s film movement that transformed the representation of sexuality from difference.
The director’s presence in Madrid, coupled with the premiere of his new work, makes this film season an event which extols both his career and his form of gazing and inhabiting the city from the queer, the community and the poetic. In these times of eviction and urban homogenisation, Sachs’s film-making reminds us that the neighbourhood can also be a gesture of care, a form of resistance, a future promise.
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In the activity, dance, poetry and performance become tools of memory and resistance via a programme which surveys the history of samba, from its origins in Bahia to its consolidation in Rio de Janeiro. It features the participation of more than ten Brazilian artists and pays homage to key figures in samba such as Tia Ciata, Clementina de Jesús, Cartola, Dona Ivone Lara, Elza Soares, Martinho da Vila and Alcione.
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Friday, 21 November 2025 – Check programme
The Crossed Vignettes conference analyses the authorship of comics created by women from an intergenerational perspective and draws from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Across different round-table discussions, the programme features the participation of illustrators Marika, Carla Berrocal, Laura Pérez Vernetti and Bea Lema and researchers Viviane Alary, Virginie Giuliana and Elisa McCausland.
The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
Moreover, the activity is put forward as a continuation to the exhibition Young Ladies the World Over, Unite! Women Adult Comic Book Writers (1967–1993) and the First International Conference on Feminist Comic Book Genealogies, held in April 2024 at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In redefining the visual narratives of the comic book and questioning gender stereotypes in a male-dominated world, women comic book writers and artists have impelled greater visibility and a more prominent role for women in this sphere. The study of intergenerational dialogue between female artists past and present enables an analysis of the way in which these voices reinterpret and carry the legacy of their predecessors, contributing new perspectives, forms of artistic expression and a gender-based hybridisation which enhances the world of comics.
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