Lavapiés street parties in Esta Es Una Plaza, 2025
Photograph: Álvaro Espinosa
Held on 23 Apr 2026
The Situated Voices programme offers de-hierarchised spaces of reflection and debate in which to generate, from situated experiences, collective knowledge in connection with present debates. With the title Climate Shelters for a Liveable City, this latest session looks to collectively address challenges around the accessibility of climate shelters in Madrid and to build a landscape of collaborative networks.
With the climate emergency, cities have become environments which are becoming harsher in the summer months due to high temperatures, exacerbated by concrete, and a lack of green spaces or cool, sheltered leisure areas not always bound up with consumerism. In recent years, community spaces and citizen and institutional collectives have started to organise “climate shelters”: accessible spaces providing shelter, shade, rest and relaxation to counter extreme climates, spaces which, faced with an increasingly chronic climate crisis, have proliferated in our cities as necessary, urgent places.
The previous experience of Climate Shelter. A Space for Rest, organised in the summer of 2025 by the Museo Reina Sofía, with the Museo Situado assembly, initiated a dialogue with other likeminded endeavours in the city. Therefore, this conversation seeks to gather their shared successes and challenges, particularly in that which refers to accessibility — and the consideration of exclusion and related solutions — with a view to thinking jointly about interventions for the summer of 2026. The encounter also touches on how to work in a network of collaboration: joining, supporting and connecting different climate shelters in Madrid, thinking collectively about how to respond to the climate crisis, the material realities approached in each project and meeting the specific needs of each context.
The networked organisation of climate shelters appears as a common horizon of resistance and organisation to tackle this eco-social crisis, a crisis that is no longer a future threat but a present condition which forces us to redefine ways of inhabiting the city.
Programme
En el marco de
Organised by
Museo Situado, GRIGRI, Esta Es Una Plaza, Teatro del Barrio and Maestras del Barrio
Participants
Teatro del Barrio
is a space for culture and politics in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood which draws from the citizen movement, working as a cooperative of cultural consumption and a centre of thought from which to organise shows, workshops and theatre, music, poetry and dance activities. This assembly-oriented project operates as a platform of civil unrest and is an active member of different neighbourhood social economy and solidarity networks.
Intermediae Matadero
is a space in Matadero Madrid centred on research and innovation in socially committed artistic practices. Since it was unveiled in 2007, it has operated as a hub of open culture for developing collective projects on ecology, mediation and the right to the city. Moreover, it is a reference point at the crossroads between art and community, offering a programme of workshops, seminars and exhibitions linking creatives and the neighbourhood fabric.
Dominic Royé
is a geographer and climate scientist, and a Ramón y Cajal researcher at MGB (the Biological Mission of Galicia) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), as well as a reference point as an R educator to analyse spatial data. His scientific work focuses on bioclimatology, studying how extreme events such as heatwaves impact public health. By creating open-code education resources he looks to strengthen community and transform complex data into accessible knowledge to drive policies of climate adaptation.
La Termometrada
is a citizen initiative driven by neighbourhood collectives, associations, individuals and ecologists who use the collective measuring of temperatures in urban space to analyse the impact of city design when facing high temperatures, a lack of green spaces and excessive concrete. The initiative aims to raise awareness and foster more sustainable, fair and resilient city models to deal with the climate crisis.
Esta Es Una Plaza
is a self-managed community garden in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood which operates through an open, assembly-based system on a site allocated for community use by Madrid City Council in 2008. This alternative space of leisure, exchange and socialising opens as a climate shelter in the summer due to its tree-covered spaces, allotment and the lack of usable free spaces in the area.
Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid
is a cultural institution which disseminates contemporary arts and thought, organising interdisciplinary programmes which foster creation, critical reflection and access to culture as a citizen space of encounter. Inside this framework, it runs the Climate Shelter, an initiative which transforms its Ballroom into a free and accessible open space during the summer months, a space conceived to offer a place of encounter and rest to cope with high temperatures.
CSO La Rosa
is a squatted social centre, a space which is open to people and collectives to strengthen collective learning, seeking to share knowledge and common practices. Its activities and encounters weave alliances with city and neighbourhood struggles inside a framework of resistance that puts forward new ways of living and dealing with capitalism.
Hola Vecinas
is a non-profit neighbourhood association which came into being in 2020 in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, working to reduce social exclusion and the digital gap. The association offers free services for literacy and academic and administrative support via a volunteer network, and its work focuses on facilitating access to basic rights and encouraging autonomy for people in vulnerable situations.
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.
Dear Felix:
Saturdays at 6pm
The immediately recognisable art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which is on display, from May to October 2026, in the show Sweet Revenge, moves beyond the transmission of messages laden with poetic evocation, vital or biographical reflection, or even a clear political or ethical positioning. Rather, it seeks an active response by visitors to the exhibition. His work invites engagement with these messages so that, whether delighting, moving or challenging, it still prompts viewers to participate in the dialogue and complete the artistic undertaking with their own actions.
Thus, the guided tour Dear Felix: offers a shared, dialogue-inflected tour through the show, with the aim of collectively thinking and feeling the gestures the artist’s work puts forward. Ostensibly simple actions such as crossing through a beaded curtain to take a sweet and eat it, taking a poster from a stack of paper or simply observing a billboard closely, all contain ways of understanding life, loss, love, injustice or the passing — never linear — of time. The tour’s ultimate aim is not to set meanings or create an overload of interpretations of the work, nor does it seek to crystallise an image of the artist and his life in a response to questions which are not there. It looks instead to provide a space to open shared meaning in these apparently simple objects and to attempt a possible correspondence of return from the here and now. A lumbering attempt at responding which starts with a simple Dear Felix:
1926–2026: One Hundred Years of the Lyceum Club Femenino
Thursday, 2 July 2026
The Lyceum Club Femenino (Lyceum Women’s Club) was established in Madrid in 1926, constituting a space which opened new pathways for women to participate in Spain’s intellectual, artistic and political life in the first third of the twentieth century, and for figures such as designer Victorina Durán, pedagogue María de Maeztu, lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and artist Ángeles Santos, to name but a few. To mark the Madrid Club’s one hundredth anniversary, this research symposium examines its role as a key place for studying women’s and feminist culture in Spain’s Silver Age by analysing and vindicating the different agencies, trajectories and cultural projects that structured the space.
By way of three lectures and two round-table discussions, the symposium sets forth a journey through the Lyceum Club Femenino and the cultural context from which it emerged, from its standing as a pioneering institution to the study of cultural material from the period and the process of constructing the figure of the “modern woman”. These talks and discussions look to shed light on how new ways of thinking, creating and occupying public space were shaped, expanding the gaze on cultural, educational and social networks linked to the Lyceum — as much concerning its ties with other intellectual and artistic circles as the continuity and transformation of these networks during Republican exile. Finally, the symposium features three artistic interventions conceived to recover the artistic legacy of this space in Madrid.
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the Ministry of Culture’s cultural programme focused on the centenary of the Lyceum Club Femenino via these sessions, co-organised with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
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.