![John Baldessari, Prima Facie (Third State): From Aghast to Upset [Prima Facie (tercer estado): de aterrado a disgustado], 2005. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/so.jpg.webp)
Held on 19, 20 May 2023
Sociología Ordinaria is a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint. Over the past decade, its members have sought to render an account of the complexity and relations of power that underlie diverse social and cultural phenomena such as the use of dating apps, language around COVID-19, the world of the cuplé, reality shows, pyjama parties, popstars, TikTokers, club culture, and so on. Their encounters also endeavour to create an open and multi-disciplinary space.
An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.
Thus, it seeks to treat discomfort as a political, affective, ethical and aesthetic position and situation, and examine it in knowledge, methodological and epistemological research and production. From this perspective, discomfort also operates to indicate or reveal risk and belonging in processes of research, with the understanding that, similar to Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, we must run at least as much risk as the running people, beings, objects and entities that and whom we study. Therefore, there is importance in designing grounded research and modes of participation, in lieu of seeking to look from above and the outside, focusing on the “China in the shoe” as Latour recalls citing John Dewey, following the problem, the trouble, as Donna Haraway advises, and taking the time to pay attention and listen, breaking from resolutive and explicative aspirations.
The programme is articulated around a selection of proposals received through an open call which pursues a transdisciplinary structure, and which aims to provide a diverse and open space with the capacity to house proposals from different disciplines, styles, formats, generations and living situations.
Sociología Ordinaria is a research group from the Complutense University of Madrid’s (UCM) Sociology Department. Formed in 2011, its concerns revolve around developing new research and teaching methodologies that enable sociological imagination to be applied to contemporary daily life. The group seeks to bring to the surface the dense socio-political roots of the ordinary as abject and disdainful categories of the banal, frivolous and superficial, an aspect of social reality which is invisible in dominant academic analysis.
Friday, 19 May 2023
10am Presentation
― Conducted by Sociología Ordinaria and Germán Labrador
10:30am Methodological Unease
Develop-with Malaise. A Proposal of Epistemological and Methodological Repairs Upon Investigating the Malaise of Sexuality
― Conducted by Nerea Velázquez Berrio
Wake Up, Neighbour! They’re Evicting on Your Doorstep!
― Conducted by Mercedes Cortés, Candela Pastoriza and Iraia Pérez
Common Agencies of Feeling-Thinking for Ordinary Discomfort. On the Experimental Workshop of Creation. Stage One: Theatre-Forum
― Conducted by Feliciano Castaño Villar
As Napoleon Said: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush
― Conducted by Sopa sólida
12pm Break
12:30pm The House of Your (Bad) Dreams
The Room of Little Spears
― Conducted by Gil-Fournier Esquerra
Architecture of Temporary Fixes. Uncomfortable Mediations of Three Collectives that Are Self-Managed to Rethink Care and its Architectures
― Conducted by Tomasz Czepielik
1:15pm Diners of Discomfort
Screw the Way the Cookie Crumbles: Structural Violence at Lunchtime
― Conducted by Sheila Moreno Griñón and Javier Aarón Rubio Lora
Tabled Protocol. Codes of Conduct as Colonial Heritage
― Conducted by Youssef Taki
4pm Bodies that Matter...
Nobody Knows What a Body Can Do ― to Survive
― Conducted by Irene Mahugo Amaro
My Concentric Body
― Conducted by Virginia Rodríguez Herrero and Ruth María Soria
Corporalities that Cause (Us) (Dis)comfort
― Conducted by Irene Calderón Mazzotti
5:15pm... Bodies that Cause Discomfort
Fat Bodies, Uncomfortable Bodies. Reflections Around Fat Studies
― Conducted by Laura Albet Castillejo
Alianza Diska-Gorde
― Conducted by Itxi Guerra and Laura Castro
Saturday, 20 May 2023
10am Artefacts of (Dis)comfort
By the Skin of Our Teeth! Tasteful Minoxidil Does Sting
― Conducted by Elena Urieta Bastardés, Guillermo José Jurado Villacañas and Biel Navarro López
From Bicycle Pump to Mifepristone. Malaise, Criminalisation and Feminist Resistance in the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy (A Story)
― Conducted by Carmen Romero Bachiller
10:45am Gestations
BetaBlastoCuir and Communities of Ice
― Conducted by Ona Bros
Markets Formed by People: Discomfort as a Changing Constant in the Study of Fertility Clinics
― Conducted by Sara Lafuente Funes
11:30am Break
12pm Uncomfortable Men
Discomfort, Risk and Desire Between Men Who Have Sex with Men
― Conducted by Kerman Calvo and Ignacio de Loyola González Salgado
Uncomfortable Youth Masculinities. Confusions and Threats Perceived Before the Shattering of Traditional Values
― Conducted by Stribor Kuric Kardelis
Fluid Gender in a Gym
― Conducted by Enrico Mora
1:15pm Female Malaise
The Experience of Academic Writing Groups with Women: The Power of Sharing the Discomfort of Being a Woman at University
― Conducted by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Grey’s Anatomy: The Discomfort in a Lack of Representation of “Women’s Legacies” Found in Ordinary Aspects of a TV Series
― Conducted by Jocelina Laura De Carvalho Segato
4pm Stage Discomfort
Subnopop as a Strategy of Discomfort
― Conducted by José-Luis Anta Félez and Almudena García Manso
Precarity and Performativity in Contemporary Film: Subjectivity in Dance in Ema (Pablo Larraín, 2019) and Ya no estoy aquí (Fernando Frias, 2019)
― Conducted by Ana Sedeño Valdellos
Failures, Frauds and Other Frictions. Collective Authorship as Resistance
― Conducted by colectivo [intervalos]: Loreto Ares, Kiar Ciotoli, Irene Blanco, Gema Marín, Lara E. Marty and Marta Plaza
5:30pm Like Crazy: Malaise and Mental Health
What Happens to My Mental Health When I Study Mental Health?
― Conducted by Inés Bueno Pascual and Georgiana Livia Cruceanu
Going Crazy: Displacements of Discomfort and Managing Malaise
― Conducted by Rosa Jiménez Pereda and Vega Pérez-Chirinos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the research group Sociología Ordinaria - Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Inside the framework of
Connective Tissue. The Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme: Critical Node, Critical Sociology and TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies
![Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman [Tecnología/Transformación: la mujer maravilla], 1978-1979. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/wonder.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.