Vane Julián, untitled, 2024. Courtesy of Pikara Magazine
Held on 18 oct 2024
In the publication Ese sexo que no es uno (This Sex Which Is Not One, Akal, 2009), the philosopher Luce Irigaray sets out to travel through the monolithic representation of the sexual to recognise and liberate difference and multiplicity in pleasure. Under the title This Violence Which Is Not One, this encounter looks to emulate this defiant gesture, questioning a rigid imaginary of violence against women and the ideas of social justice associated with it.
Organised with La Laboratoria, this activity, part of a broader programme developed in parallel in Madrid, Terrasa and Manresa, is the outcome of a militant research process around systemic violence, set in motion by La Laboratoria two years ago through committed and situated dialogues in the cities of Quito, Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, São Paulo and Madrid.
By way of a conversation and series of workshops conducted by researchers who have participated in this process, the activity reflects on the different manifestations of patriarchal violence (sexual, physical, economic, legal, psychological) and its inherent relationship with other forms of violence, uncoiling a radical critique of the punitive State and the dynamics of growing criminalisation. Consequently, it aims to foster the search for new horizons of justice and trace tools and strategies which, rather than weaken, strengthen the capacity to do and weave together.
When we think of the lives of specific women, and the conflicts, paradoxes and challenges of their daily life, what comes to light immediately is the systemic dimension and complex framework of the different forms of violence they face. This violence is articulated permanently and simultaneously on multiple levels: implosion in domestic spaces; the disciplining of bodies on the streets via social and punitive institutions; the regulated movement of people between countries; violence operating as a principle of authority in working-class areas; the plundering of common land and resources; the exploitation and appropriation of vital energy; and the colonisation of futures through the financialisation of social life.
The programme This Violence Which Is Not One. Taking Back the Power Stolen from Us is the continuation of two encounters held previously in the Museo Reina Sofía: the session Situated Research in Contexts of Violence, as part of the Critical Node Militant Research, from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme Connective Tissue, and In the Spider’s Web. Children, Institutional Violence and Feminist Horizons of Justice. Furthermore, it completes the initiatives driven by La Laboratoria, Weakening Violence. The School of Popular Feminisms, and the same-titled publication Esa violencia que no es una. Movimiento feminista, Estado punitivo y otros horizontes de justicia (This Violence Which Is Not One. The Feminist Movement, Punitive State and Other Horizons of Justice, La Laboratoria, 2024).
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía y La Laboratoria. Feminist Research Spaces
Agenda
viernes 18 oct 2024 a las 17:00
Symposium
5pm Feminist Strategies and Narratives Opposite Violence
— Conversation between Luci Cavallero, Viviana Dipp Quitón and Helena Silvestre
6:15pm The War from Below and Our Struggle against the Punitive State
— Conversation between Susana Draper, Fernanda Martins and Mujeres de Frente (Mariana Collaguazo and Heidy Mieles)
7:30pm Discussion
sábado 19 oct 2024 a las 11:00
Activities in the Museo from the programme in parallel: workshop
11am Confronting Violence. What Can We Learn from Prison Abolition?
— Workshop with Susana Draper, in conversation with Adilia de las Mercedes and Miren Ortubay
According to Françoise Vergès, the fight against violence cannot evade the critique of violence that the State fosters and legitimises, nor can it escape that which relates to feminist grievances directed at the State’s judicial system. The first step to moving towards new horizons of justice lies in keeping the focus on the radical critique of the punitive, sexist and racist State and its oppressive dynamics. This three-hour workshop threads together practices, struggles, reflections and tools in a commitment to jointly imagining these horizons, as well as the possible responses to violence beyond the judicial and penal system.
sábado 19 oct 2024 a las 18:00
Activities in the Museo from the programme in parallel: conversation
6pm The Debt Is Owed to Us. Organising against Financial Looting
— Conversation between Luci Cavallero, Territorio Doméstico and Sindicato de inquilinas e inquilinos de Madrid
Starting from the slogan “The Debt Is Owed to Us”, born out of the 2020 Feminist Strike in Argentina, this discussion reflects on how debt has become a device to plunder and control our lives, raising questions around other kinds of debt (colonial, care-based) to place on the table strategies of organisation against financial looting and forms of wealth distribution created among us all.
Participants
Luci Cavallero is a lesbo-feminist activist, a member of the Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) collective and a participant in the organisation of 8M in Argentina. Her concerns revolve around issues of debt, gender and economic violence, and she is the co-author of Una lectura feminista de la deuda (Tinta Limón, 2021) and La casa como laboratorio. Finanzas, vivienda y trabajo esencial (Tinta Limón, 2022).
Viviana Dipp Quitón is a lawyer and feminist activist and a member of the Madrid 8M Commission’s Migration and Anti-racism Committee.
Susana Draper is a writer and teacher from Uruguay. She lectures at Princeton University and lives in Harlem (New York), where she participates in different feminist collectives and in the fight to abolish the prison system. She is the author of Libres y sin miedo. Horizontes feministas para construir otros sentidos de justicia (Tinta Limón, 2023).
Fernanda Martins is a professor of Law at the Universidade Federal de Santamaria (UFSM) in Brazil, a researcher in criminology and an activist for the abolition of prisons. She is the author of Feminismos criminológicos (Editores del Sur, 2023).
Adilia de las Mercedes is a feminist legal expert and an expert in critical criminology, strategic litigation, teaching and legislative development for human rights. Furthermore, she has investigated femicides and sexual violence in situations of conflict.
Heidy Mieles and Mariana Collaguazo are members of Mujeres de Frente, a care and cooperation community against established punishment in Quito, Ecuador, between female prisoners, former female inmates, self-employed street traders, urban waste recyclers, female workers paid by the job, students and teachers, children, and teenagers.
Miren Ortubay is a legal expert and researcher who backs the reduction of the penal system from a non-punitive feminism.
Helena Silvestre is a peripheral writer, favela feminist, editor of the magazine Amazonas and a member of the Escola Feminista Abya Yala (São Paulo). Her publications most notably include Cochichos de amor e outras alquimias (Txai, 2023) and Notas sobre el hambre (Avenate, 2024).
Sindicato de inquilinas e inquilinos de Madrid is a self-organised collective that fights for the right to fair and affordable housing rents and for a neighbourhood life with guarantees and rights, and against rent-seeking and real estate speculation.
Territorio Doméstico is a trans-border collective made up of domestic and care workers and their struggle.
![Maja Bajevic, Arts, Crafts and Facts (Top 10%, 90%) [Artes, artesanías y datos (Ricos 10%, 90%)], 1967. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/nim.jpg.webp)
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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.
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.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
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.