Protest on Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion, 2019.
Photograph: The Madrid Commission for the Right to Abortion
Held on 11 Dec 2025
In recent decades, feminist movements from different corners of the globe have made significant progress with respect to reproductive and sexual rights. Despite differing legal realities, women’s freedom to decide about their bodies and the right to terminate pregnancies legally, accessibly and safely remains one of the main struggles.
Yet “it only takes a political, economic or religious crisis for the rights of women to be called into question”, as Simone de Beauvoir asserted. Following the so-called “fourth wave” of feminism, from 2017 onwards, a conservative international reaction has returned women’s bodies and their reproductive rights to the centre of an ideological battle. This pressure, moreover, has not only spread through countries like the USA, Poland, Hungary and El Salvador, but has also re-appeared in Spain, where, despite decades of decriminalisation, women still face real difficulties to access this right.
Disinformation campaigns — such as the so-called post-abortion syndrome — and narratives about “traditional values” and the “correct family” are combined with social stigma and fear, administrative constraints, a lack of funding, the exclusion of migrant women in an irregular situation and conscientious objection, thereby diminishing public health cover and perpetuating inequality.
Faced with this context, the new edition of Situated Voices seeks to ignite an urgent and necessary dialogue on the dangers of losing rights already gained. By way of the experience of feminist activists and collectives, the aim is to delve into the main violations and threats facing this sphere, in addition to political strategies of resistance, organisation and cross-border alliances to defend women’s right to freely make decisions about their bodies.
The activity also includes a performance from the La Tortuga Centre for Creation and Research (CCIC)
Programme
Organised by
Participants
8M Lavapiés
is a feminist assembly in the Lavapiés neighbourhood and part of the Autonomous Feminist Movement of Madrid. It is a self-organised anti-racist and transfeminist space which has, for a number of years, maintained ongoing community work which is open to female residents, working with different neighbourhood collectives to build a Lavapiés that confronts all forms of sexist, racist and LGBTQIA+-phobic violence, where the sustainability of life — of all lives — is at the heart. The collective is also part of the Museo Situado assembly.
Centro de Creación e Investigación (CCIC) La Tortuga
a centre for creation and research, is a Lavapiés-based cultural centre which runs music, theatre, political art — in the Escuela de Teatro de los y las Oprimidas — writing, language and anthropology classes. It is also a collective member of the Museo Situado assembly.
Colectivo Aborto Antirracista Madrid
an anti-racist abortion collective, is an organisation that fights for the right to abortion and the sexual and reproductive health of racialised and migrant women in the Community of Madrid. Adriana Zumarán will participate in the activity on behalf of the collective.
Comisión por el Derecho al Aborto de Madrid
a Madrid-based commission for the right to abortion, is part of the autonomous feminist movement and works for the right to free and safe abortion at no cost in public healthcare for all in the Community of Madrid. Elena Martín will participate in the activity on behalf of the collective.
Vanessa Mendoza Cortés
is a psychologist and an expert in sexual violence in Andorra, a country where exercising the right to abort is prohibited under all circumstances, including rape. In 2014 she founded the feminist association Stop Violències, which supports women who wish to get an abortion legally and safely in France and Spain. From 2019 to 2024 the Government of Andorra opened legal proceedings over her struggle, from which she was acquitted.
Verónica Gago
is a philosopher, political scientist, researcher and feminist activist from Argentina. Her work encompasses the world of research, academia and activism from feminism. She is the author of La razón neoliberal. Economías barrocas y pragmática popular (Traficantes de sueños, 2015), among other texts.
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.