Held on 16 nov 2023
This thirtieth edition of Situated Voices addresses the housing problem via the neighbourhood collectives GRIGRI and Lavapiés, ¿dónde vas?, along with Museo Situado. With its gaze fixed on the nearby Lavapiés neighbourhood and in connection with other areas and territories, a conversation is set out from a place of urgency and around collective alternatives to the current predatory and individualistic real estate model.
In recent years, issues such as the lack of social housing, rising rent prices, the mass proliferation of holiday apartments, accelerated gentrification and rampant real estate speculation have triggered an unprecedented housing crisis. In Spain, the cycle stretches back to 1998 with the approval of the so-called “Land Use Law”, which caused the housing bubble to burst in 2008 and thus compromised the Spanish mortgage system, the effects of which still reverberate today. The first citizen initiatives that emerged, such as PAH (The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), helped to keep many people afloat and was defined by collective strategies to halt evictions and by sparking public debate around the constitutional right to access decent housing.
Today’s imposed model is rent seeking. From 2017 to the present, new tenants’ unions and neighbourhood organisations have emerged around state territory, looking to strengthen collective power. May 2023 saw the approval of the new Law 12/2023 for the right to housing, and with the aim of regulating basic conditions that guarantee access to decent and adequate housing under affordable conditions. Yet, what are the real changes that protect the right to access decent housing? How is the legislation going to impact people’s material and living conditions? What mechanisms does the market have to avoid state regulation? How can residents organise in neighbourhoods and cities to slow down speculative trends?
This activity also offers a children’s play centre, organised by the collective Esta es una plaza, to help with childcare. A registration form for the activity is available at this link
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Participants
Carme Arcarazo is a housing activist with Sindicat de Llogateres i Llogaters and a researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Urban Research (IDRA). She studied Economy and Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, and has specialised in the study of cities, both in Mexico (Urban Management, UNAM) and in Barcelona (MA in Urban Studies, UAB). Moreover, she has worked in urban laboratories in Mexico City and Sant Boi, and has been an international observer, supporting people defending land and territories under threat in southern Mexico. internacional, acompañando a personas defensoras de la tierra y el territorio amenazadas en el sur de México.
José Daniel López García is a member of the cooperative Entrepatios and a resident of Las Carolinas, the first collaborative housing building in the city of Madrid. Entrepatios is an intergenerational, eco-social, right-of-use housing cooperative which aims to put into practice other forms of city living which do not allow for real estate speculation and which consider environmental sustainability and the creation of community.
Mar M. Núñez is an artist and designer, as well as a member of the Museo Situado assembly, and a Lavapiés resident. As an artist, her concerns and practice focus on public art, which she works on through her citizen activity. Since 1998, she has participated in social movements with the aim of critically intervening in the construction of city and culture. At present, she is part of the Lavapiés, ¿dónde vas? collective, which addresses the gentrification and touristification of the Lavapiés neighbourhood.
Víctor Manuel Palomo is an activist and spokesperson for the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid (the Union of Madrid Tenants) and specialises in issues related to rentals and foreclosures from a right-to-housing perspective. He also works to defend residents’ right to the city in specific areas where there is also human rights violations, such as Cañada Real Galiana. Galiana.
![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
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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.