Reasons and Hate. Phobic Logics in and towards LGBTIAQ+ Collectives
Round-table Discussion
Held on 07 jul 2023
Hate and fear run through our bodies, minds, actions and discourses in different ways and from different angles as a symptom and consequence of violence which is inherited and reactivated in the present. Today, we are witness to spiralling phobia which tends to flood social space, driving out difference and stopping other types of affects from germinating.
This round-table discussion features the participation of Ballet Djédje, Demetrio Gómez, Elena Prous, Tatiana Romero Reina and Iki Yos Piña, the voices of different agents hit hard by these logics of hate and fear and who refuse to assume the role of victim that pushes them aside and threatens to absorb the energy and capacity to evolve and build other ways of relating.
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Ballet Djédjé is a queer writer and PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research is centred on the experiences of African homosexual people on the African continent and in Europe, racism in the gay community in Europe and the deconstruction of discourses on homosexuality in Africa. He is the author of How to Love Yourself as a Gay Man in Africa? (2023), a self-help book published independently which offers advice on loving oneself and self-acceptance, coming out, homosexuality, faith and sexual health.
Demetrio Gómez is an activist who works for human rights and intersectionality and is recognised internationally among the Romany people. His work is also approached, transversally, from an inclusive, intersectional, decolonial and queer perspective. He has worked as an expert and trainer in the Council of Europe, the European Commission and different non-governmental organisations and international institutions centred on anti-racist activism and the fight against xenophobia. He is the founder of the Federation of Gypsy Youth Associations in Spain (Jachivela) and the Forum of European Roma Young People (FERYP), and has been on the Board of Trustees of the International Foundation of Human Rights and the European LGBTIAQ+ Romany Platform. He is the president of VERVERIPEN, Rroms for Diversity.
Elena Prous is an activist and columnist. Trained in nursing (2006), she has been part of the Independent Life Movement (MVI) since 2010. Through the body and performance, she works on functional diversity, for instance in Aguanta tú que puedes (You Can Withstand), a piece that was part of the 8th Contemporary Art Biennial – ONCE Foundation (2022). She is a contributor to publications such as La Madeja, Pikara Magazine, Diario.es and El Salto, and has taught training courses and consultancy on the realities facing people viewed as having disabilities in different institutions like Tabakalera – International Centre of Contemporary Culture in Donostia-San Sebastián, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Complutense University of Madrid. She currently writes the blog Laincontenida.com.
Tatiana Romero Reina holds a degree in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and an MA in Twentieth-Century History in Europe from Humboldt University in Berlin. She specialises in the history of women, gender relations and sex-gender dissidence and studies aspects related to contemporary history with an intersectional perspective. In recent years, her work has revolved around the migration experience, and she has spent over fifteen years as an anti-racist and transfeminist activist via workshops and training programmes. She is the co-founder of Grupo Kollontai, and works with Pikara Magazine, Feminopraxis and El Salto. She recently coordinated the volume (h)amor8 gordo, published by Continta Me Tienes in 2023.
Iki Yos Piña Narváez are an untamed fugitive, writer, performer and draughtsperson from the Caribbean. They investigate anti-colonial archives and sexual dissidence, Black memories of the Caribbean and spirituality and are part of the Ayllu collective, Cooperativa Periferia Cimarrona and the experimental group of radical Black thought In the Wake, from the Conciencia Afro space. They have contributed to publications such as Devuélvannos el oro. Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales (Colectivo Ayllu, 2018), No existe sexo sin racialización (Colectivo Ayllu, 2017), (h)amor6 trans (Continta Me Tienes, 2021), and Futuro Ancestral (Pensare Cartonera, 2022), among others. Their creations are also part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection and they have participated in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Frestas – Art Triennial in Brazil (2021) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2022).
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Comisariado
Jesús Carrillo
Organiza
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.