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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
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.