Held on 22 Mar 2023
In recent months, citizen demonstrations have exposed the dismal situation felt, for a number of years now, in the rooms of hospitals and medical centres across the Spanish State: public healthcare is in danger. Its clear demise, resulting from the progressive neglect of the country’s public authorities since the economic crisis in 2008, has intensified since 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately damaging the pillars of a public model recognised the world over.
At the present time, the State’s healthcare expenditure is below the European Union average, with Madrid the Spanish Autonomous Community with the lowest health investment per capita. A lack of resources and the absence of public management in line with the needs and challenges of a decent and universal healthcare system is combined with the physical, mental and emotional exhaustion of healthcare professionals — a strain that inevitably results in the exodus of healthcare staff, poor healthcare and never-ending waiting lists.
In the face of this situation, Situated Voices 27. Healthcare Should Be Protected, Not Sold and Neglected looks to open a dialogue around issues which jeopardise a universal human right that should be guaranteed by the State and safeguarded for future generations. How can we heal a system under threat? How can we care for those who look after our health? How can we avoid healthcare exclusion? How can we defend the public system before the privatisation of life? These and other questions are addressed in this encounter by representatives from primary healthcare, community activism and the citizen defence of healthcare.
Coordinated by
Red Interlavapiés and Hola vecinas
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Programme
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Participants
Rosa Bajo is a spokesperson for the right to access health and is an instructor of basic notions of care for communities excluded from the healthcare system. She has worked as a GP in primary healthcare and supports a non-excluding National Healthcare System which tends to everyone. Her most recent work has been developed in the Lavapiés Medical Centre, and currently she is part of Red Interlavapiés and Senda de Cuidados.
Maribel Giráldez has been a GP for the past fifteen years in the Nuestra Señora de Fátima Medical Centre in the Carabanchel neighbourhood of Madrid and also belongs to the Health Council from the same district. She is currently a spokesperson for the Platform of Madrid Medical Centres, a movement of primary healthcare workers whose main goal is to protect a public, universal and quality healthcare model; that is, a system that advocates a primary care system over the current hospitalocentric model.
Laura López Casado is an activist in the feminist movement and a member of different feminist spaces and assemblies located in the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid, where she lives. Moreover, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Lisbon, where she is writing her thesis on the independent publications of the feminist movement from an Iberian Studies perspective.
Carmen Rodríguez Fernández has worked as a primary healthcare nurse throughout her professional career and has been the director of the Villa de Vallecas Medical Centre for the past twelve years. She also participates in the Ethical Assistance Committee of the Sureste Assistance Board and is part of the Guarantee and Evaluation Committee for applying assistance in dying in the Community of Madrid, established to put into practice the Euthanasia Law. She currently participates in the Red Solidaria de Acogida.
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.