Lavapiés street parties in Esta Es Una Plaza, 2025
Photograph: Álvaro Espinosa
Held on 23 Apr 2026
The Situated Voices programme offers de-hierarchised spaces of reflection and debate in which to generate, from situated experiences, collective knowledge in connection with present debates. With the title Climate Shelters for a Liveable City, this latest session looks to collectively address challenges around the accessibility of climate shelters in Madrid and to build a landscape of collaborative networks.
With the climate emergency, cities have become environments which are becoming harsher in the summer months due to high temperatures, exacerbated by concrete, and a lack of green spaces or cool, sheltered leisure areas not always bound up with consumerism. In recent years, community spaces and citizen and institutional collectives have started to organise “climate shelters”: accessible spaces providing shelter, shade, rest and relaxation to counter extreme climates, spaces which, faced with an increasingly chronic climate crisis, have proliferated in our cities as necessary, urgent places.
The previous experience of Climate Shelter. A Space for Rest, organised in the summer of 2025 by the Museo Reina Sofía, with the Museo Situado assembly, initiated a dialogue with other likeminded endeavours in the city. Therefore, this conversation seeks to gather their shared successes and challenges, particularly in that which refers to accessibility — and the consideration of exclusion and related solutions — with a view to thinking jointly about interventions for the summer of 2026. The encounter also touches on how to work in a network of collaboration: joining, supporting and connecting different climate shelters in Madrid, thinking collectively about how to respond to the climate crisis, the material realities approached in each project and meeting the specific needs of each context.
The networked organisation of climate shelters appears as a common horizon of resistance and organisation to tackle this eco-social crisis, a crisis that is no longer a future threat but a present condition which forces us to redefine ways of inhabiting the city.
Programme
En el marco de
Organised by
Museo Situado, GRIGRI, Esta Es Una Plaza, Teatro del Barrio and Maestras del Barrio
Participants
Teatro del Barrio
is a space for culture and politics in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood which draws from the citizen movement, working as a cooperative of cultural consumption and a centre of thought from which to organise shows, workshops and theatre, music, poetry and dance activities. This assembly-oriented project operates as a platform of civil unrest and is an active member of different neighbourhood social economy and solidarity networks.
Intermediae Matadero
is a space in Matadero Madrid centred on research and innovation in socially committed artistic practices. Since it was unveiled in 2007, it has operated as a hub of open culture for developing collective projects on ecology, mediation and the right to the city. Moreover, it is a reference point at the crossroads between art and community, offering a programme of workshops, seminars and exhibitions linking creatives and the neighbourhood fabric.
Dominic Royé
is a geographer and climate scientist, and a Ramón y Cajal researcher at MGB (the Biological Mission of Galicia) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), as well as a reference point as an R educator to analyse spatial data. His scientific work focuses on bioclimatology, studying how extreme events such as heatwaves impact public health. By creating open-code education resources he looks to strengthen community and transform complex data into accessible knowledge to drive policies of climate adaptation.
La Termometrada
is a citizen initiative driven by neighbourhood collectives, associations, individuals and ecologists who use the collective measuring of temperatures in urban space to analyse the impact of city design when facing high temperatures, a lack of green spaces and excessive concrete. The initiative aims to raise awareness and foster more sustainable, fair and resilient city models to deal with the climate crisis.
Esta Es Una Plaza
is a self-managed community garden in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood which operates through an open, assembly-based system on a site allocated for community use by Madrid City Council in 2008. This alternative space of leisure, exchange and socialising opens as a climate shelter in the summer due to its tree-covered spaces, allotment and the lack of usable free spaces in the area.
Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid
is a cultural institution which disseminates contemporary arts and thought, organising interdisciplinary programmes which foster creation, critical reflection and access to culture as a citizen space of encounter. Inside this framework, it runs the Climate Shelter, an initiative which transforms its Ballroom into a free and accessible open space during the summer months, a space conceived to offer a place of encounter and rest to cope with high temperatures.
CSO La Rosa
is a squatted social centre, a space which is open to people and collectives to strengthen collective learning, seeking to share knowledge and common practices. Its activities and encounters weave alliances with city and neighbourhood struggles inside a framework of resistance that puts forward new ways of living and dealing with capitalism.
Hola Vecinas
is a non-profit neighbourhood association which came into being in 2020 in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, working to reduce social exclusion and the digital gap. The association offers free services for literacy and academic and administrative support via a volunteer network, and its work focuses on facilitating access to basic rights and encouraging autonomy for people in vulnerable situations.
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.