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
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.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.