Held on 26 Nov 2020
The collective imaginary and information around the propagation and spread of COVID-19 have radically changed the way we relate to one another, so much so that we perceive encounters with others as a threat. Where does this leave the need to hug, touch and smell one another? How does this situation alter our sexual practices? What new imaginaries shape the current private and public sphere? What drifts will be brought about by mandatory social distancing, curfews and hidden encounters?
This conversation addresses aspects such as desire, contact and risk in times of social distancing, with a primary goal of collectively questioning and re-situating the body as a place of interaction from distant voices, ties and practices.
Pleasure Surfaces picks up on the title of an album by Argentinian band Virus recorded in 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic — a disease that affected Federico Moura, the singer, and Daniel Melgarejo, illustrator of the album cover, which displays ambiguous naked blue buttocks. If HIV and AIDS led to a pronounced stigmatisation of non-normative sexual practices, then COVID-19 appears to have, socially speaking, reinstated a climate of fear, condemnation and persecution.
This online encounter is moderated by professor and researcher Nicolás Cuello and features the participation of activist and sex worker Beyoncé; teacher and researcher Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky; writer, poet and journalist Gabriela Wiener; and audiovisual producer and researcher Lucas Disalvo.
Programme
Situated Voices
Force line
Action and Radical Imagination
Organised by
Museo Situado
Access: Free
Times:
Madrid, Spain – 6pm
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 2pm
Participants
Beyoncé is a trans activist, migrant and street sex worker. Her struggles focus on the rights of female sex workers, specifically transexual women, and, in alignment with her activist and resistance-based positions, she is co-founder of Agrupación Feminista de Trabajadoras del Sexo (Feminist Group of Sex Workers, AFEMTRAS)
Nicolás Cuello is a professor and researcher. A research fellow at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET), a lecturer at the National University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, and secretary on the Free Chair “Artistic Practices, Sexual Politics”, he is also a founding member of Archivo de Culturas Subterráneas (Archive of Underground Cultures), an archive and classification project for independent cultural productions, and editor of the newspaper La Protesta Sexual. His research centres on the intersection of artistic practices with sexual politics, critical representations of emotions and underground graphic art cultures from the post-dictatorship period in Argentina to the present.
Lucas Disalvo is an audiovisual producer, researcher and teacher with a post-doctoral fellowship at University of La Plata, where he also earned a degree in Audiovisual Arts. Alongside Nicolás Cuello, he co-edited the book Críticas sexuales a la razón punitiva. Insumos para seguir imaginando una vida junt*s (Ediciones Precarias, 2018) and is co-author of Ninguna línea recta. Contraculturas punk y políticas sexuales en Argentina 1984-2007 (Alcohol & Fotocopias/Tren en Movimiento, 2019). His work focuses on trans studies in pornography, sexual and visual politics, fandom cultures, perverse spectatorship, and transformative textual practices, etc.
Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky is a teacher and researcher. In 2017, he received a grant from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) to work on a residency of training and research in the Programme of Independent Studies (PIE) and in 2019 received a research and innovation grant in Visual Arts from the Regional Government of Catalonia. Moreover, he has participated and collaborated in putting on different exhibitions in the sphere of art and culture, for example Dislocated Archive (MACBA, 2017) and Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action (MACBA, 2018).
Gabriela Wiener is a writer, poet and journalist who has published the following books: Nueve lunas (Marea Editorial, 2009), Llamada perdida (Malpaso, 2014), Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu (La Bella Varsovia, 2014), Sexografías (Seix Barral, 2015) and Dicen de mí (Esto no es Berlín, 2018), all of which have been translated into different languages. She also writes for an array of publications and newspapers, for instance La República, El Salto, El País and The New York Times Spanish edition. She is currently working on a piece she wrote and stars in: Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti (Falling in Love with You Is Madness) in Teatro del Barrio, Madrid.
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.