Situated Voices 16
Another End of the World Is Possible. Examining the “New Normal”
Held on 14 Oct 2020
In the sombre days at the start of the pandemic, graffiti bearing the slogan “Another end of the world is possible” appeared on different walls in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. It paraphrased, with a measure of humour, the old slogan “Another world is possible”, reclaiming the right to decide our future, no matter how dark and turbulent it may seem.
As with all crises, the one caused by COVID-19 has laid bare the strengths and weakness of our societies, bringing to light, once again, the need for global and radical change to guarantee the sustainability of life.
Another End of the World Is Possible. Examining the “New Normal” puts forward an open conversation to address how we imagine other possible futures to the backdrop of a new post-COVID society. What have we learned or are learning from this crisis? What changes are occurring? What world do we want to build? Is the normal we aspire to return to, post-lockdown, part of the problem? What alternatives are considered with regard to the old and new normal in relation to healthcare, care, ecology, the economy, work, education, culture and life itself?
These premises will be debated in a virtual encounter, with each participant offering their perspective on the proposed subject, before leading on to an interactive debate. The activity will be moderated by translator, researcher and activist Marta Malo, and will feature the participation of Santiago Alba Rico, a philosopher, writer and essayist; Rosa Bajo, a primary healthcare doctor and advocate of rights in the universal access to health services; and Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian feminist activist and environmentalist.
Programme
Situated Voices
Force line
Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by
Museo Situado
Times:
Madrid, Spain – 6pm
Tunis, Tunisia – 5pm
Bogotá, Colombia – 11am
Participants
Santiago Alba Rico is a writer and essayist with a philosophy degree from Madrid’s Complutense University. In the 1980s, he was a screenwriter on Spain’s legendary television programme La bola de cristal (The Crystal Ball) and has published in excess of twenty books on politics, philosophy and literature, in addition to three children’s stories and a stage play. Since 1988, he has lived in the Arab world, translating Egyptian poet Naguib Surur and Iraqi novelist Mohammed Jydair into Spanish. He is also a regular contributor with different media outlets.
Rosa Bajo is a primary healthcare doctor and an activist who advocates a non-discriminatory national health system that provides universal care. She supports the right to access healthcare and is an instructor in basic notions of care for communities excluded from the healthcare system. Her most recent work has been carried out in the Lavapiés Health Centre in Madrid.
Marta Malo is a translator, researcher and activist, and coordinator of the book Nociones Comunes. Ensayos y experiencias entre investigación y militancia (Traficantes de Sueños, 2004). She has been involved in different collective and militant research initiatives with the aim of activating communities, combatting inequality and defending the commons. The transformation of care in a neoliberal context is one of her main concerns. She has been involved in different practical essays, most notably Precarias a la deriva (Madrid, 2002–2006).
Francia Márquez is an Afro-Colombian human rights activist and environmentalist who was part of the delegation to negotiate Peace Agreements in Colombia. She is currently chairperson of the National Council of Peace, Reconciliation and Co-existence (CNPRC). From 2013 to 2016 she was a legal representative for the Community Council of the afro-descendent communities of La Toma. In 2014, she participated in the so-called “March of the Turbans” to demand the end of illegal mining and land occupation, and the Black Women’s Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Land, for which she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018.
Marta Pérez is a professor at Madrid’s Complutense University and Duke University. She participates in the movement Yo Sí Sanidad Universal (Yes to Universal Healthcare), which has been creating ways to build universal healthcare since 2012. Her research centres around health and territory, the healthcare system and access, and around possible struggles and institutional forms to ensure the right to health. This work is carried out with the precarious balance between the university and the outside, primarily with the militant research collective Entrar Afuera (Enter Outside). Moreover, she is part of the Training School for Women Promoters of Community Health with Red Interlavapiés (the Interlavapiés Network), Senda de Cuidados (Path to Care), Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory), Red Solidaria de Acogida (Refuge Solidarity Network), Yo Sí Sanidad Universal (Yes to Universal Healthcare) and Museo Situado (Situated Museum).
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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.
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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.