Creating Ambience: Ordinary Ways for Better Atmospheres
Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #13
Held on 29, 30 May 2025
Creating Ambience: Ordinary Ways for Better Atmospheres is the title of a new encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This fresh edition seeks to approach daily, ordinary and extraordinary environments and atmospheres. From “achieved environments” to “rarified atmospheres”, the theme here responds to a concern over the lack of air and the dismal atmospheres of an uncertain present, in addition to shining a light on the powers, arrangements and fixes used to clean, care and embellish personal environments — and to let off steam. A question is raised over how to ventilate and air lived-in spaces, avoid the shortness of breath that marks the present and to generate strategies to breathe easier.
Furthermore, it explores ways of naming and thinking in these environments and in the difference between the breathable and the toxic, focusing on how the latter is used to negatively single out aspects that are part of the normal and the ordinary. Thus, different tones and actions are put forward: the outdoor atmosphere, the climate of accompaniment, ecosystems for liveable lives and achieving a vibe or atmosphere of the imagination.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the research group Sociología Ordinaria – Complutense University of Madrid (UCM)
Actividad accesible
Esta actividad cuenta con lazos de inducción magnética (para personas con audífonos) que deben solicitarse previamente mediante correo a centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es
Las personas interesadas podrán solicitar con antelación la reserva de un asiento con mayor visibilidad, mediante correo a centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es
Participants
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 highlight the dense socio-political roots of the ordinary, an aspect which is often indiscernible in predominant academic analysis. Under the slogan “learning from the banal, the frivolous and the superficial”, its members look to render an account of the complexity and power relations underlying 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 and club culture.
Programme
Thursday, 29 May 2025
10am Ordinary presentation
Coming Out of Class: Pedagogical Environments and Designs
10:15am Looking, Weaving and Acting for Better Pedagogies
Ez da giro! Hallway Experiments to Enliven Sociology
― Conducted by Jone Allur, Ekain Carrasco, María Céspedes, Naroa Gallues, Paula Gutiérrez-Ponte, Miren Iriarte, Ane Juez, Jone Mendibil, Iñaki Martínez de Albéniz and Asier Amezaga (EHU/UPV)
Restitching Worlds: Textile Artivism and Cultural Practices as Ecosystems of Social Sustainability
― Conducted by Óscar M. Blanco Sierra, Renata Dračková and Miren Edurne Herrán (CSIC-UPV)
AI: Imagination in the Classroom. One Performance, Two Teachers, No Target
― Conducted by Irene Blanco Fuente and Miguel Ángel (Mikel) López Sáez (UCM and URJC)
11:30am Inside/Outside Experimentations
In-person Atmospheres, Virtual Atmospheres. Glasses for What?
― Conducted by Carmen Clara Bravo Torres, Mariana Buenestado-Fernández (UCO), María García-Cano Torrico, Eva F. Hinojosa Pareja, Azahara Jiménez Millán and Elisa Pérez Gracia
The Classroom in the Street and the Street in the Classroom
― Conducted by José Manuel del Barrio Aliste and María Luisa Ibáñez Martínez (USAL)
12pm Coffee and Stuff
12:30pm Interior Design
Producing and Designing Environments, Atmospheres and Experiences Inside the Classroom: The Case of Sociology(ies) of Education(s)
― Conducted by Daniel Muriel (InnoKLab. EHU/UPV)
User Instructions for Designing Socio-productive Environments
― Conducted by Ángeles Fuentes and Kiko Tovar (Escuela Superior de Diseño de Madrid and UCM)
Playing with the Materiality of the Chair: Exploring, with Infrastructures from the Department of Social Sciences through Design, the Chair’s Capacity to Influence Spaces and Bodies
― Conducted by Keio Urkijo Marcos (EHU/UPV)
1:45pm They Had to Be There…
They’ve Made Us a Court and We Must Constitute Ourselves
― Conducted by the Sopa Solida (UCM/USAL) collective
Outdoor Bodies: Climates, Airs and Gusts of Wind
4pm Ventilating (with the gerund)
It’s Stuffy in Here, or How to Air Old Rags and How to Entangle Ourselves to Face Violence from Punto Violeta Somosaguas
― Conducted by Punto Violeta Somosaguas (Paula Martín Peláez, María del Carmen Peñaranda Cólera and Marta Pérez Pérez) (UCM)
Airing the House. Writings of Testimonies on Sexual Violence
― Conducted by Estíbaliz de Miguel Calvo (EHU/UPV)
5pm Body Climates: Desires and Moral Panics
“I have a right to behave badly to have a good time”: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Environment of Sexual Services for Women”
― Conducted by Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández (UNED)
5:45pm In the Wind: Songs and Tales
Gathering in Translucence. For a Politics of the Ambiguous
― Conducted by Candela Crespi
Sing Crying: To Give Some Thought to Places of Utterance
― Conducted by Ana Martínez Pérez
Friday, 30 May 2025
Shacking Up Together: Creating Atmospheres and Good Vibes
10am Homes
Just Like Home in No Apartment: The Construction of “Home-ness” between Young People in Madrid
― Conducted by Santiago Fandos Planelles and Manuel Macías Gómez de Villar (UCM)
SMS and BURR STUDIO: The Experience of a Collective Housing Process
― Conducted by Sato Díaz, María Artigas, Sira Peláez and Ramón Martínez (SMS and BURR STUDIO)
11am Neighbourhoods and Streets
Collective Memory and Self-managed Parties and Culture in Palma
― Conducted by Isa Nadal Amengual (UCM-UIB)
A Mental Map of the Neighbourhood
― Conducted by the BarriLab (Associació de Veïnes de Canamunt) cultural project
GREEN AWNING: Postcards from Another Heritage
― Conducted by Pablo Arboleda and Kike Carbajal (CSIC and independent photographer)
12:15pm Coffee with Posters
Street Air. Breathing, Building and Inhabiting Public Atmospheres
― Conducted by Francisco Javier Rueda Córdoba (UCM)
Memetic Catharsis
― Conducted by María Cecilia Cordero (UPM-UCM)
The Dark Side of Desire
― Conducted by Celia Espada Guerrero, Amanda López Bernad and Celia Roncalés Villa (UCM)
Questioning Masculinities from a Reflection on Paternities. Contributions from a Feminist Approach
― Conducted by Débora Imhoff (CONICET-UNC)
12:45pm We Need to Talk: Collective Care
Al Akhawat Collective. United in Art-Making
― Conducted by Karim Khourrou Gadour, Oumaima Manchit Laroussi, Sanae El Mokaddim Ayadi, Youssef Taki Miloudi and Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi (UCLM, UCM, ULL and UB)
1:15pm Escaping Forwards… But in Which Direction?
With So Much Advance I’m Heading for the Forest
― Conducted by Manuel Cabrera de Diego (UCM)
“'Mastodon Is Not Much Fun’, and So Many Other Fictions on the FediVerso”
― Conducted by Rubén Blanco (UCM)
Atmospheres of Feeling: Feelings and Senses
4pm Bad Vibe
Reasoning Together: Self-analytical Conversations for the Revolution to Come
― Conducted by Ane Campaña Blanco and José Llopis Manchón (UCM)
The Room of “Adolescence”: The Domesticity and Culture of Sexist Hate
― Conducted by Alba Mira Roda Ignacio and Moreno Segarra (UCM)
From Meme to Abyss: Generative AI, Viral Aesthetics and the Ordinary Construction of Political Hate in the Extreme Right
― Conducted by Gabriel Bayarri Toscano and Concepción Fernández-Villanueva and (URJC and UCM)
5:30pm The Imperium of the Senses
Heat – Tools of Collective Transformation
― Conducted by Daniel Torrego (UPM-UA)
What Does a “Gym” Smell of? Gender and Sexuality as Olfactory Regulators
― Conducted by Enrico Mora (UAB)
Noise/Ambient, Ambient/Noise: Noise in the Construction of Ordinary Environments
― Conducted by Pablo Santoro (UCM)
6:45pm Ordinary Farewell
![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)
![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)
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.