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
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.