Held on 22, 29 Mar 2025
SOS Racismo Madrid and the Alliance for Solidarity, together with Museo Situado, present the fifth edition of the Festival of Anti-racist Culture, in conjunction with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Through “artivism” and community creative processes, this encounter seeks to raise awareness of hate speech, call for anti-racist action and spotlight the agenda of racialised people. The festival, with the title Cooltura Futura, champions a change of paradigm in which diversity and anti-racism are its cornerstone. The encounter encompasses participatory spaces such as workshops, debates, ballroom and concerts, and features the participation of migrant, racialised and gender and sexual-affective dissidences. The activities that unfold embrace beauty, identity and community love and eschew the narrative of pain to build narratives of future, enjoyment and social transformation, demonstrating that art not only condemns inequalities but also opens pathways from pride, hope and collective strength.
The full programme is available here (in Spanish).
Collaboration
Madrid City Council and Teatro Accesible
Accessibility
Agenda
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Presentation of projects for the Artivism against Racism competition, by the Alliance for Solidarity
Locutorio Itinerante (Itinerant Phone Box) is an installation made by Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta that draws inspiration from the phone boxes that were prevalent in the 1990s. Via a series of short stories simulating telephone calls from the daily lives of migrant people, the stress is placed on challenges and strong bonds of alliance.
Sonoridades y corpografías sagradas (Sacred Sounds and Corpographies) is a proposal by the Migrantes Transgresorxs collective and is based on a series of encounters and workshops conducted by young people. By way of podcasts, distant memories and histories of resistance interweave to create a combative counter-discourse to racist, xenophobic and LGBTI-phobic narratives.
¿Qué Mi(g)ras? Fanzine, by the ¿Qué Mi(g)ras? collective, which originates from the Artivism Laboratory, puts forward different artistic techniques to make the work of migrant and racialised artists visible. On this occasion they will present a fanzine.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Get Ready with Peruvian transvestite Gad Yola
This session sees Gad Yola guide attendees so they can connect with the political history of drag and its relationship with the anti-racist struggle. Through examples and performances, it prompts a reflection on aesthetics and the drag/transvestite/transformist body. During her make-up, hairstyling and dressing process, she questions the Eurocentric and hegemonic canons of beauty, sharing her experience to foster an anti-racist drag culture in Spain while she offers beauty advice on their dismantling.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 13:00
Encounter: Anybody Walking? Dissident Bodies that Inhabit the Ballroom
Perla Naomi, Cacao Díaz and Brad Scott in Conversation
Ballroom culture originated in the USA as a necessary radical act by the LGBTQIA+, Black and Latin community to respond to discrimination. Crystal LaBeija, a Black trans woman, created the first ballroom for Black and Latin people, creating a safe space for the community, in contrast to today, where ballroom culture opens its doors to all bodies, but without forgetting their origins. In this conversation, representatives from the ballroom community in Spain and part of the Kiki House of Laveaux speak about dissident bodies that inhabit it and their roles — those that perform, those that gaze and those that inhabit the ballroom beyond the dancefloor and categories.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Teatro Accesible also supports the activity through the loan of hearing aid devices: personal magnetic induction loop systems and sound amplification with earphones.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 14:00
Community Lunch with Aires de Alondra
A collaborative, community-centred culinary experience conducted by Aires de Alondra. The initiative puts forward gastronomy and culture as a tool for dialogue and care.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 22 mar 2025 a las 16:00
Queens at the Museum Kiki Ball
A ball is an event created within ballroom culture, with different categories of competition encompassing fields such as dance (voguing, dance-offs), fashion and the fashion show (runway, fashion killah, labels...), face and body (face, body realness) and others such as Black Hair Magic and Commentator vs Commentator. The aim is to create a space where anybody can express themselves on stage.
It sees in the spring as the Queens come together in the Museo Reina Sofía to celebrate another night of bodies that inhabit the ballroom. The space, replete with artworks, also demonstrates how you can break away from avant-gardes and stereotypes and how you can be the masterpiece that enraptures beholders.
Categories: Black Hair Magic, Fashion Killah, Washed Face, Trans Men Realness/FemmeQueen Realness with Posing, Commentator vs Commentator, OTA (Open to All) Runway, Walk for Your Sistah!, OTA (Open to All) Performance, Vogue for Your Sistah! and Dance-off.
Presented by: Perla Naomi, MC QueenBitch 007 and DJ Jourdan McDaniel Laveaux.
Jury: Godmother Koko Anunnaki, Cori Angels and Cacao Laveaux.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs on the third floor (access with lift).
Chairs are available for people who require them.
Location: Nouvel Building, Lobby
Capacity: 200 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 11:30
Encounter: Creative Processes, with Noelia Cortés
Writer Noelia Cortés reflects on the power of the imagination, story and the word to transform common imaginaries, and how the Roma people have their own voice, despite the gaze of others constantly making them create from antagonism.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
The first row is reserved for people with hearing or visual disabilities.
Teatro Accesible also supports the activity through the loan of hearing aid devices: personal magnetic induction loop systems and sound amplification with earphones.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 12:00
Presentation of projects for the Artivism against Racism competition, by the Alliance for Solidarity
Locutorio Itinerante (Itinerant Phone Box) is an installation made by Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta that draws inspiration from the phone boxes that were prevalent in the 1990s. Via a series of short stories simulating telephone calls from the daily lives of migrant people, the stress is placed on challenges and strong bonds of alliance.
Sonoridades y corpografías sagradas (Sacred Sounds and Corpographies) is a proposal by the Migrantes Transgresorxs collective and is based on a series of encounters and workshops conducted by young people. By way of podcasts, distant memories and histories of resistance interweave to create a combative counter-discourse to racist, xenophobic and LGBTI-phobic narratives.
¿Qué Mi(g)ras? Fanzine, by the ¿Qué Mi(g)ras? collective, which originates from the Artivism Laboratory, puts forward different artistic techniques to make the work of migrant and racialised artists visible. On this occasion they will present a fanzine.
Location: Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity: 150 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 16:30
Situated Tours of the Collection
Tours of the Collection conducted by mediators from the Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation.
The situated tours are life journeys through the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, whereby situated mediators seek to appeal to the desires and needs of migrant communities. Mediation is understood as a space of knowledge production and a vehicle for welcoming anti-racist and decolonial gazes that enrich museological narratives.
Accessible activity
Wheelchair loans and folding cane seats are available to the public
Location: Sabatini Building, rooms of the Collection. Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance, Information Desk
Capacity: 40 people
sábado 29 mar 2025 a las 19:00
Conciertos de Pleneros del Exilio y Justicieros de la Cumbia
This session places music at the heart of a proclamation of Latin American and Caribbean culture: preserving its musical community roots and transmitting a cultural legacy of rhythm and dances.
Accessible activity
The activity is wheelchair accessible and has accessible WCs.
Seats are available for those who need them.
Accessible activity with vibrating backpacks provided by Teatro Accesible, with prior request by filling out a form from SOS Racismo Madrid.
Location: Sabatini Building, rooms of the Collection. Meeting point: Sabatini Building, Main Entrance, Information Desk
Capacity: 40 people
Participants
Aires de Alondra is a cultural association and family initiative that uses gastronomy and culture as tools for dialogue and care.
The ¿Qué mi(g)ras? collective came into being in 2024 from the Alliance for Solidarity’s Artivism Laboratory and puts forward different art techniques to grant visibility to the work of migrant and racialised artists.
Noelia Cortés is a poet and essayist. Her most recent publications include the poetry collection Del mar y la muerte (Editorial Cicely, 2024) and the essay La higuera de las gitanas (Ediciones en el mar, 2022), which analyses the deep-rooted anti-Romani sentiment in spaces such as feminism, culture, the media and language. Her latest work has been as a creative advisor on the documentary Farruquito, premiered in 2025.
Cacao Díaz is an artist of African descent whose practice spans different live-art and stage disciplines, constructing narratives and vibrations through the body that draw inspiration from experiences as a migrant and trans body. Díaz’s relationship with ballroom culture connects to affective communities of sexual dissidences and migrants, while the artist’s creative research focuses on recovering the stolen body, Afro-descendent rituals, transvestite fiction and performances of the body.
The Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation is a project fostered by the Museo Situado assembly and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Tentacular Museum and Education Departments, in collaboration with intercultural mediator Hanan Dalouh Amghar. Its objective is for the Museo to be a more accessible space that is mindful of the demands of the community of which it is part, geographically and affectively, understanding mediation as a space of knowledge production and a vehicle for welcoming anti-racist and decolonial gazes which enrich the narratives of the Museo’s Collections. The Situated Mediators run visits to the Museo which appeal to the desires and needs of its communities and conduct them in Spanish and other languages such as Wolof, Bengali, Darija, Arabic and French.
Justicieros de la cumbia is a music band which plays a mix of cumbia, rock, reggae, funk, with a dash of madness, creating a stage-shaking musical experience.
Cindy Paola Martínez-Acosta is a political scientist and researcher.
Migrantes Transgresorxs formed in 2009 as a focal point of the LGBTI+ social movements of migrant, refugee and racialised people in Spain. The intersectional collective fights to preserve racialised lives and enhance the construction of migrant communities through encounters, workshops, actions and campaigns on human, social and cultural rights.
Perla Naomi is a trans-Indigenous-migrant artist. With a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, she works inside the framework of ballroom, opening new paths from an anti-racist, decolonial, trans and queer discourse. She has shown her work at Matadero Madrid, the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, La Parcería, the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, the Festival Ciudad Bailar, the SOS Racismo’s Anti-racist Festival in Puerta del Sol in 2019, the Boiler Room Festival, CoruFest, Noche Blanca Oviedo and Don’t Hit a la Negrx, among other art events.
Pleneros del exilio are a Madrid-based Puerto Rican band who come together to preserve idiosyncrasy. The rich musical rhythms that characterise Puerto Rico are the main vehicle they use to proclaim Latin American and Caribbean culture, taking it to stage and street.
Brad Scott was born in Venezuela and currently lives in Madrid. For the past four years, Scott has been actively involved in the ballroom community, most notably as the Princess in the House of Laveaux, as well as performing, during this period, in renowned spaces like La Casa Encendida, Matadero Madrid and Noche Blanca Oviedo.
Youssef Taki is an artist and researcher whose work encompasses, from different approaches, an understanding of migratory processes and colonial and post-colonial occurrences, analysing how they impact the present and daily life. Taki is part of the Al’Akhawat collective.
Teatro accesible is a pioneering project centred on integrating accessibility measures into theatre in Spain. It was set up in 2011 with the support of the Vodafone Foundation, the Centro de Rehabilitación Laboral Nueva Vida and the technology and accessibility company Aptent. Their approach centres on adapting plays by incorporating subtitling, audio description and sign language, as well as creating inclusive experiences such as touch tours and accessible talks for people with vision impairments.
Gad Yola is a multidisciplinary artist who, through the practice of drag, creates a critical discourse around heteronormativity and European whiteness. Born in Lima and raised in Madrid, she works to disrupt and rethink institutions, exhibition rooms and Spanish pop culture. She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and employs music and audiovisual production to express her opposition to racism and LGBTI phobia.
Más actividades
Economy of Hate
18 ABR, 9 MAY 2026
Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
![Dias & Riedweg, Casulo [Crisálida], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/desafios-cine-2.png.webp)
Other Voices in Us All
17 ABR, 8 MAY 2026
A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
We Go On from Here… And Will Not Move
Thursday, 16 April and Thursday, 7 May 2026 — 19:00
This session advances a programme focused on the most elemental side of performance: a simple, direct act that starts from the self-exhibition of the body. At certain points, from the calculated serenity of Miguel Benlloch’s Tengo tiempo (I Have Time, 1994); at other times, from the challenging and visceral impulse of Bollos (Buns, 1996), by Cabello y Carceller, or the rage of Habla (Talk, 2008), by Cristina Lucas; and, finally, from video-graphic experimentation, disconcerting and sustained in the dance culture of Moving Backwards (2019), by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose mise en scène reminds us that it is not actually déjà vu but the present, unfortunately, that moves through a reactionary period.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas
Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April, 2026 – Check Programme
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.
In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.
The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.
Juan Uslé and the New York Experience
15 ABR 2026
Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.
The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.
Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.