![John Baldessari, Prima Facie (Third State): From Aghast to Upset [Prima Facie (tercer estado): de aterrado a disgustado], 2005. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/so.jpg.webp)
Held on 19, 20 May 2023
Sociología Ordinaria is a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint. Over the past decade, its members have sought to render an account of the complexity and relations of power that underlie diverse social and cultural phenomena such as the use of dating apps, language around COVID-19, the world of the cuplé, reality shows, pyjama parties, popstars, TikTokers, club culture, and so on. Their encounters also endeavour to create an open and multi-disciplinary space.
An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.
Thus, it seeks to treat discomfort as a political, affective, ethical and aesthetic position and situation, and examine it in knowledge, methodological and epistemological research and production. From this perspective, discomfort also operates to indicate or reveal risk and belonging in processes of research, with the understanding that, similar to Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, we must run at least as much risk as the running people, beings, objects and entities that and whom we study. Therefore, there is importance in designing grounded research and modes of participation, in lieu of seeking to look from above and the outside, focusing on the “China in the shoe” as Latour recalls citing John Dewey, following the problem, the trouble, as Donna Haraway advises, and taking the time to pay attention and listen, breaking from resolutive and explicative aspirations.
The programme is articulated around a selection of proposals received through an open call which pursues a transdisciplinary structure, and which aims to provide a diverse and open space with the capacity to house proposals from different disciplines, styles, formats, generations and living situations.
Sociología Ordinaria is a research group from the Complutense University of Madrid’s (UCM) Sociology Department. Formed in 2011, its concerns revolve around developing new research and teaching methodologies that enable sociological imagination to be applied to contemporary daily life. The group seeks to bring to the surface the dense socio-political roots of the ordinary as abject and disdainful categories of the banal, frivolous and superficial, an aspect of social reality which is invisible in dominant academic analysis.
Friday, 19 May 2023
10am Presentation
― Conducted by Sociología Ordinaria and Germán Labrador
10:30am Methodological Unease
Develop-with Malaise. A Proposal of Epistemological and Methodological Repairs Upon Investigating the Malaise of Sexuality
― Conducted by Nerea Velázquez Berrio
Wake Up, Neighbour! They’re Evicting on Your Doorstep!
― Conducted by Mercedes Cortés, Candela Pastoriza and Iraia Pérez
Common Agencies of Feeling-Thinking for Ordinary Discomfort. On the Experimental Workshop of Creation. Stage One: Theatre-Forum
― Conducted by Feliciano Castaño Villar
As Napoleon Said: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush
― Conducted by Sopa sólida
12pm Break
12:30pm The House of Your (Bad) Dreams
The Room of Little Spears
― Conducted by Gil-Fournier Esquerra
Architecture of Temporary Fixes. Uncomfortable Mediations of Three Collectives that Are Self-Managed to Rethink Care and its Architectures
― Conducted by Tomasz Czepielik
1:15pm Diners of Discomfort
Screw the Way the Cookie Crumbles: Structural Violence at Lunchtime
― Conducted by Sheila Moreno Griñón and Javier Aarón Rubio Lora
Tabled Protocol. Codes of Conduct as Colonial Heritage
― Conducted by Youssef Taki
4pm Bodies that Matter...
Nobody Knows What a Body Can Do ― to Survive
― Conducted by Irene Mahugo Amaro
My Concentric Body
― Conducted by Virginia Rodríguez Herrero and Ruth María Soria
Corporalities that Cause (Us) (Dis)comfort
― Conducted by Irene Calderón Mazzotti
5:15pm... Bodies that Cause Discomfort
Fat Bodies, Uncomfortable Bodies. Reflections Around Fat Studies
― Conducted by Laura Albet Castillejo
Alianza Diska-Gorde
― Conducted by Itxi Guerra and Laura Castro
Saturday, 20 May 2023
10am Artefacts of (Dis)comfort
By the Skin of Our Teeth! Tasteful Minoxidil Does Sting
― Conducted by Elena Urieta Bastardés, Guillermo José Jurado Villacañas and Biel Navarro López
From Bicycle Pump to Mifepristone. Malaise, Criminalisation and Feminist Resistance in the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy (A Story)
― Conducted by Carmen Romero Bachiller
10:45am Gestations
BetaBlastoCuir and Communities of Ice
― Conducted by Ona Bros
Markets Formed by People: Discomfort as a Changing Constant in the Study of Fertility Clinics
― Conducted by Sara Lafuente Funes
11:30am Break
12pm Uncomfortable Men
Discomfort, Risk and Desire Between Men Who Have Sex with Men
― Conducted by Kerman Calvo and Ignacio de Loyola González Salgado
Uncomfortable Youth Masculinities. Confusions and Threats Perceived Before the Shattering of Traditional Values
― Conducted by Stribor Kuric Kardelis
Fluid Gender in a Gym
― Conducted by Enrico Mora
1:15pm Female Malaise
The Experience of Academic Writing Groups with Women: The Power of Sharing the Discomfort of Being a Woman at University
― Conducted by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Grey’s Anatomy: The Discomfort in a Lack of Representation of “Women’s Legacies” Found in Ordinary Aspects of a TV Series
― Conducted by Jocelina Laura De Carvalho Segato
4pm Stage Discomfort
Subnopop as a Strategy of Discomfort
― Conducted by José-Luis Anta Félez and Almudena García Manso
Precarity and Performativity in Contemporary Film: Subjectivity in Dance in Ema (Pablo Larraín, 2019) and Ya no estoy aquí (Fernando Frias, 2019)
― Conducted by Ana Sedeño Valdellos
Failures, Frauds and Other Frictions. Collective Authorship as Resistance
― Conducted by colectivo [intervalos]: Loreto Ares, Kiar Ciotoli, Irene Blanco, Gema Marín, Lara E. Marty and Marta Plaza
5:30pm Like Crazy: Malaise and Mental Health
What Happens to My Mental Health When I Study Mental Health?
― Conducted by Inés Bueno Pascual and Georgiana Livia Cruceanu
Going Crazy: Displacements of Discomfort and Managing Malaise
― Conducted by Rosa Jiménez Pereda and Vega Pérez-Chirinos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the research group Sociología Ordinaria - Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Inside the framework of
Connective Tissue. The Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme: Critical Node, Critical Sociology and TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies
![Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman [Tecnología/Transformación: la mujer maravilla], 1978-1979. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/wonder.jpg.webp)
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.