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From 6pm to 9pm / Nouvel Building, Auditoriums Lobby
Photographic exhibition
Multiple Borders. Disobedience and Common Struggles
María Sierra Carretero (Carre) and Red Interlavapiés
This show denotes an exercise which revolves around the graphic memory of certain actions propelled by residents in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and their resistance to the multiple borders erected between us. Borders of a European fortress, safeguarding privileges at the expense of the rights of others. Borders in the form of killing fences and the denial of aid, turning the Mediterranean into a deplorable grave. Borders in the access to basic rights, such as healthcare, through unjust laws and bureaucratic obstacles which become real invisible concertina wires, or through difficulties to regulate the administrative status of thousands of migrants locked up in Foreigner Internment Centres (CIES) or doomed to invisibility. Borders in the form of the harassment and persecution of street vendors and traders, criminalising their only source of income within the system. Borders in religion-related prejudice, swinging between the fear of difference and the simplified association between Islam and violence.
The images compiled in the show conflate to form the cry of bodies marked by injustice, ill-treatment and exclusion; bodies that transform the burden of precariousness and inequality to defend, together, their dignity and question consciences, turning vulnerability into a strength. It is no accident that these photographs are largely street images — scenes of diversity. Thus, the importance placed on this common, shared space looks to give the streets back to their real owners: the people that inhabit them.
More importantly, Multiple Borders is a proposal: to collectively build a way of life without waging war against the other and without stigmatising difference, thereby building a world of possibilities for each and every one of us. Equally, it decries – surviving is not a crime – and affirms: co-existence in diversity is both possible and engenders more inclusive ways of life.
Red Interlavapiés
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6:30pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Screening
Gaza
Gaza (Spain, 2018, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 18’)
A screening of the short documentary directed by Carles Bover and Julio Pérez del Campo.
Winner of the Goya Award for Best Short Documentary, 2019.
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7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Round-table discussion
With the participation Patricia Fernandez Vicens, Roberta Ferruti, Helena Maleno and Julio Pérez del Campo. Moderated by Ana Longoni.

Held on 24 jun 2019
This eighth edition of Situated Voices, promoted by the Museo Situado network, an initiative in which different migrant collectives and neighbourhood associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood collaborate with the Museo Reina Sofía, reflects on the borders which obstruct crossings and refuge for people in the contemporary world. A world that pronounces itself global yet guards access with visible and invisible borders, both material and symbolic. By way of the photographic exhibition Multiple Borders. Disobedience and Common Struggles, the screening of the short documentary film Gaza and a round-table discussion, the session calls for a consideration of different tactics to resist or permeate frontiers: daily survival in the Gaza Strip, experiences of welcoming refugees, for instance the scheme implemented by the Italian municipality of Riace, and the critical situation in Morocco, where thousands of people are detained and criminalised over their attempts to reach Europe.
Framework
Situated Voices
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía

Participants
María Sierra Carretero (Carre) is a self-taught photographer and a member of Red Interlavapiés. Through her experience travelling to Spain’s southern border, she has felt the need to convey, through the camera, that another world is not only possible; it is essential.
Patricia Fernández Vicens is a “lawyer in the trenches”, and an activist with expertise in “stretching the law” to protect everyone, regardless of race, status and origin. She works as a lawyer for the La Merced-Migraciones Foundation and is a legal Neighbourhood Coordinator in Parroquia de Entrevías, San Carlos Borromeo. She was one of the lawyers in the Tarajal case, in 2014, and has worked in the defence of activist Helena Maleno.
Roberta Ferruti is an independent journalist. She worked to promote the first Solidarity Purchase Groups (GAS in its Italian acronym) in the Italian province of Lacio, from the Università Verde dei Castelli Romani, Rome, and collaborated in the emergence of the first draft bills for biological agriculture in Italy. In 2016 she embarked upon a long journey around the immigration routes of southern Italy, ending up in Riace. Since 2017 she has worked in the Solidarity Network of Commons (RECOSOL in its Italian acronym).
Helena Maleno is a journalist, writer and researcher. A specialist in migration and human trafficking, she is the founder of the collective Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders). Since 2001 she has lived in Morocco, reporting human rights violations on the border with Spain and working to support and empower sub-Saharan migrant communities in the migration process. On her social media accounts, she warns of migrant boats adrift and the fence jumps that occur, coordinating rescues and safeguarding people’s basic rights.
Julio Pérez del Campo holds degrees in Environmental Protection from the University of Ireland (2004) and Environmental Science from the Rey Juan Carlos University. He has directed and produced, with Carles Bover, the feature-length documentary Gas the Arabs (2017) and the short documentary Gaza (2018) on the situation in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli bombing in the summer of 2014.
Red Interlavapiés is a network of people united against borders and precariousness. Based in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, it is made up of people and collectives that fight for people’s free movement, the right to migrate and those aspiring to a society in which no human being is illegal. The network presents itself as “a diverse network made up of local and migrant people, with or without documents, who feel the urgent need to act against ever-increasing brutal and racist forms of injustice that criminalise poverty and migration and deny human and social rights”.
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
September, 2025 – May, 2026
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight two-hour sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.