Situated Voices 24
Between Dreams and Deceits: Trafficking as a Form of Slavery in the 21st Century
Held on 16 jun 2022
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the forced migration of millions of people, particularly women and girls, has once again become a pressing issue that reignites the debate around human trafficking and the situations that cause it. In many cases, migration and exile lead to many people, particularly young people and minors, being kidnapped or disappearing involuntarily as they try to flee situations of violence and extreme poverty. Their life stories cross over in trafficking networks which take advantage of a lack of rights and protection in countries of the Global North to abuse and exploit them through this form of slavery in the 21st century.
The 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, drafted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), exposes how sexual exploitation remains the main target of global traffickers (in 50% of identified cases), with women and girls representing 65% of victims and the greatest risk factors traffickers exploit related to financial needs, irregular migratory conditions, family conflicts (particularly in the case of teenagers) and emotional dependency with the trafficker as a support mechanism.
This edition of Situated Voices looks to reflect on the different problems people being trafficked face, exploring the causes and consequences and stressing the urgent need to create public policies to support and protect them.
Inmaculada Antolínez is an anthropologist and professor in the Department of Employment Law and Social Security at the University of Cádiz. An expert in issues related to human trafficking, she has participated in different research and international cooperation projects on the migration of women from Sub-Saharan Africa. This research has led her to carry out creative work with Esperanza Jorge Barbujano, for instance the ethnographic documentary Irioweniasi. El hilo de la luna (2018), the touring group exhibition Mujeres que caminan mundo en los márgenes de la vida (2021) and the illustrated book Decálogo de Huellas (2021), working as co-authors with Akhere Monday.
Margarita Escamilla has been a professor of Criminal Law since 2008 and teaches Criminal Law and Criminology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her main line of research centres on the criminalisation of migrants and refugees, and the use of criminal and sanction law in managing human mobility. Today, she is head researcher on the project Exclusión social y sistema penal y penitenciario. Análisis y propuestas sobre tres realidades: migración y refugio, enfermedad mental y prisión, and has published numerous scientific works, technical reports and informative articles.
Patricia Fernández Vicens is a human rights advocate specialised in children, migratory issues and asylum. She works as a lawyer for the Neighbourhood Coordinator from the San Carlos Borromeo parish and La Merced Migraciones Foundation in Madrid. Furthermore, she is part of Red Solidaria de Acogida to support the rights of refugee and migrant people.
Tania García Sedano holds a PhD from Carlos III University in Madrid and is a writer, researcher and national and international advisor. A criminal law and human rights expert, she works as an alternate magistrate at Madrid’s Provincial Court and is an associate professor of Criminal Law at Carlos III University. She has also been an advisor to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on contemporary forms of slavery. She is the author of three monographs and over thirty articles related to penal issues and fundamental rights.
Helena Maleno is a human rights activist, journalist, researcher, documentary-maker and writer from Spain. A specialist in migrations and human trafficking, she founded the Caminando Fronteras collective. She has lived in Morocco since 2011, from where she denounces the human rights violations on Spain’s southern border and works to support and empower Sub-Saharan migrant communities in the migration process.
Organised by
GRIGRI, Museo Situado and Red Solidaria de Acogida
Programme
Inside the framework of
Participants
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
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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
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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.