Held on 29 jul 2020
In the health crisis caused by COVID-19, the political, media, healthcare, economic and social spotlight has been focused primarily on limiting infection, saving as many lives as possible, and working to prevent economic collapse. Yet at the same time the extreme dangers for millions of migrants and refugees trapped at borders across the world goes unnoticed.
The Virus in Fortress Europe sets out an open conversation between social agents that gather diverse experiences and foreground the lives, in these times of pandemic, of migrant people who are blocked, ill-treated and crowded together at Europe’s internal and external borders, the problems they face and their resistance. A situation not only related to the pandemic emergency, but one which is historical and intersected by aspects of violence, racism, xenophobia, human trafficking, kidnappings and rapes, factors which are serious human rights violations and daily occurrences at the borders the European Union and its different Member States have erected as the walls of their fortress.
This virtual encounter is moderated by Nines Cejudo, an activist in Red Solidaria de Acogida (the Refuge Solidarity Network). It also features the participation of Álvaro Luca, a volunteer for the NGO Action for Education; José Palazón, founder of the Pro-Rights in Childhood Association (PRODEIN) in Melilla (Frontera Sur); and Dani Rivas, head of communication at the organisation Salvamento Marítimo Humanitario.
With a view to offering a broader vision of the situation in other borders during the pandemic, specifically in Libya, Morocco, Mexico and Serbia, the session is accompanied by the broadcast of a video podcast and recordings: direct testimonies of migrant people compiled by journalist Michelangelo Severgnini in the project Exodus – Escape from Libya and by the association No Name Kitchen, from Serbia; the story of Aimée Lokake, secretary-general of the Council of Sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco (CMSM) and president of the Congolese Community of Morocco, who fled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006, and, following a journey in which she and her son endured desperate situations in the middle of the Sahara desert, she settled in Morocco to try to reunite her family; and Encarni Pindado, an independent photographer for different press outlets who centres her work on human and social rights, migration and gender in Mexico, Central America and the south of the United States.
Coordinated by:
Red Solidaria de Acogida
Programme:
Situated Voices
Force line:
Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by
Museo Situado
Participants
Nines Cejudo is an activist in Red Solidaria de Acogida (the Refuge Solidarity Network) and founder of the Cultural Association ANGATA, which creates solidarity networks in seven countries in West Africa. Her work pivots around refuge and the abuse of human rights suffered by people in forced displacement.
Álvaro Lucas is a volunteer at the NGO Action for Education. From March 2020, he has been teaching on the Greek island of Chios and also works on the international campaign by the collective Europe Must Act, which fights for European countries to welcome refugees living in inhumane conditions in camps on the Aegean Islands.
José Palazón is founder of the Pro-Rights in Childhood Association (PRODEIN) in Melilla (Southern Border). His work is focused on the defence of rights for non-nationalised children — often stateless and with no recognition of their right to schooling — immigrants of all origins, and women suffering abuse.
Dani Rivas is head of communication at Salvamento Marítimo Humanitario, an organisation which in 2017, faced with the tragic situation in the Central Mediterranean route, decided to set up the rescue project AITA MARI - Proyecto Maydayterraneo, with support from different instituions and volunteers on an individual basis.
![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.