
Held on 24 may 2023
The right to the city and public space, understood as a communal life territory, is increasingly at risk. The rising cost of housing, the emptying-out of social centres and police violence as a form of social control are just some of the symptoms of growing privatisation. Such circumstances bring to light more sharply the need for a common space built to encompass the interests, needs and desires of the communities that inhabit it.
Opposite the capitalist concept of the city as a financial centre or tourist park built for consumerism, Situated Voices 28 seeks to articulate the foundations, from collectiveness, to reformulate concepts of property and belonging in relation to public space. How can we impact the desired city model? How can we reclaim, defend, attain, conquer or confer the right to the city? Who remains outside of this right? Who are legitimised for its reclamation and who are not? Who do we exclude and which divides (social, economic, gender-based, racial, among others) hinder its application? From institutions, how can we facilitate a participatory city based on asylum, reciprocity and mutual recognition?
In looking for the answers to these questions, this encounter is set out as a space for sharing experiences, tools and neighbourhood actions which search for channels of collective transformation. A conversation-discussion takes place in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, prompting, from specific lived experiences, attendees to reflect on the right to the city and the possibilities of intervening in and reappropriating urban spaces.
This activity offers a children’s play centre organised by the collectives Esta es una plaza (This Is a Square) and Banco de Alimentos del Barrio (The Neighbourhood Food Bank) to facilitate work and childcare. Click on this link and fill out the form to sign up.
Mercedes Arce “Chiqui” is a librarian and a co-founder and current chairperson of Parque Sí Chamberí (Park for Me, Chamberí), a neighbourhood association which works to defend, advocate, promote and develop green areas and recreation in Madrid’s Chamberí neighbourhood. She also participated in making the documentary De interés general. Un barrio por un parque (Common Good. A Neighbourhood for a Park, 2021), by Miguel Ángel Sánchez Sebastián.
Jose Luis Fdez. Casadevante “Kois” is a sociologist, international food sovereignty expert at the International University of Andalusia (UNIA) and a member of the Garúa cooperative. He is also a neighbourhood activist, and is currently involved in promoting urban agriculture projects as the head of Huertos Urbanos (Urban Allotments) at the Regional Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Madrid (FRAVM). Furthermore, he writes the blog Raíces en el asfalto (Roots on the Pavement)
Dolores Galindo Fontán is a journalist and researcher of social and cultural anthropology. She is the chairperson of Dragones de Lavapiés, a football club whose mission is to weave, through sporting values and competition, ties of solidarity, respect and community, advocating dialogue between people from more than fifty different countries.
Sara Porras Sánchez is a professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. She works as a researcher on different research projects in the Community of Madrid, analysing urban processes and conflicts and the importance of socio-community networks in the configuration of neighbourhoods and in creating social space.
Eduardo Ramis is an anthropologist and a member of the Pasillo Verde Imperial Neighbourhood Association, one of the member collectives in the platform #YoDefiendoEsteÁrbol (#IDefendThisTree), which came into being to protect trees and green areas under threat from the project to expand Metro de Madrid’s Line 11 in five areas of the city (Arganzuela, Carabanchel, Moratalaz, Puente de Vallecas and Retiro).
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Banco de Alimentos del Barrio y Esta es una plaza
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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.