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
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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
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.