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).
![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 Jord à 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.