Images of a march against the Immigration Law, April 1991, Madrid
Photograph: Rose Maloka
Held on 24 Apr 2025
This encounter opens a space of debate and conversation around an alarming rise in the criminalisation of migrant people and the ensuing threat to their human rights.
At the present time, we are witnessing a shifting gaze towards the right to migrate, gaining more insight into harder borders established in the recent European Pact on Migration and Asylum (PEMA), mass deportations being implemented by the US Government and the xenophobic narratives and proliferation of fake news on social media. A change which, to a large degree, entails dehumanising processes for migrant people. With this situation comes a modern-day social fear of the “other”, the foreigner, which reproduces colonial and racist structures in different spheres and on different scales.
In Spain, forty years have passed since the first Immigration Law, Organic Law 7/1985, of 1 July, was approved on the rights and freedoms of foreigners, a law which was modified at different points, abolished and then substituted by Organic Law 4/2000, of 11 January, on the rights and freedoms of foreigners in Spain and their social integration. In May 2025 a new reform came into effect, deemed insufficient by social organisations, despite certain improvements, on account of the lingering constraints to creating a structural change that guarantees equal rights for all migrants. In response, there is an active movement that pursues social demands via campaigns such as the Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP), driven by the Regularisation NOW and #PadrónPorDerecho (#RegisteredInhabitantsByRight) movement.
The Museo Situado assembly calls on the public and participants to collectively discuss the urgent need for visibility around these issues and the forms of violence people exercising their right to migrate face.
Organised by
Programme
Situated Voices
Organised by
Participants
Abdellatif Khatir is an anti-racist activist. He was born in Sudan twenty-five years ago and is a member of the ELIN Association and works in the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR). He is currently studying Administrative Management.
Ana Bibang is of African descent and an Afro-feminist from Madrid who is a specialist advisor in immigration, migratory issues and international mobility. She is also part of Espacio Afro. Moreover, she is a columnist and contributor with different media outlets, such as the magazine CTXT, the Las Tardes programme on Radio Nacional (RTVE) and Pikara Magazine.
Marlene Nava Ramos is an academic, researcher and activist in immigration issues. She lectures in the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University and studies the political economy of migratory detention and prison developments. Her research on abolition and immigration justice has been published in different media outlets.
Movimiento Cosecha is a non-violent movement that works for the protection, dignity and respect of eleven million undocumented immigrants in the USA. The movement comprises a network of immigrant leaders, families and workers that organise and mobilise local and national campaigns.
Pepa Torres is a social educator, philologist, theologist and resident of Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood. She is an activist with different collectives of migrant and feminist struggles, such as Red Interlavapiés, Territorio Doméstico and Senda de cuidados. She is also a member of the Museo Situado assembly.
Tatiana Retamozo Quintana is a lawyer and activist for migrant women’s rights. She is a member of the Amalgama Association of Latin American Women and a founder of the Network of Latin American and Caribbean Women, of which she was chairwoman from 2018 to 2021.
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.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.