The School of Situated Mediation

Propelled jointly from Museo Situado and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area, in collaboration with intercultural mediators Hanan Dalouh Amghar and Marlene Gildemeister, The School of Situated Mediation is a project which sets out to reflect upon the notion of “the situated” applied to cultural mediation and research into alternative practices of mediation which are mindful of the specific local context of the Museo: the Lavapiés neighbourhood. The endeavour continues the strand of work already under way with the School of Rights and Spanish Language School for the Migrant Population workshops, also previously hosted by the Museo.

Processes of cultural mediation are debated, designed and implemented across seven sessions with a group of ten people with migrant-life pathways who develop their own journeys and accompanying narratives. Thus, it opens up the chance of offering visits to the Museo which meet the desires and needs of communities that have trouble connecting to it up close, largely owing to the symbolic, material and cultural barriers they encounter in gaining access.

These visits also adapt to the languages of the different migrant communities in Madrid, neighbourhood associations and collectives that are part of the Museo Situado assembly and everyone with an interest in reflecting on migration from cultural institutions. The trained mediators from this school will conduct museum visits in Spanish and other languages, such as Wolof, Bengali, Dariya, Arabic and French.

With a methodology of collaborative and horizontal work, The School of Situated Mediation offers tools to make the Museo a more accessible space, one which is perceptive of the demands of the community within it, both geographically and affectively and with mediation understood as a space to produce knowledge, not as a service tool.

Hanan Dalouh Amghar is an intercultural social mediator and a translator-interpreter in Arabic, Dariya and Berber languages. She studied Intercultural Social Mediation at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and Forced Migration: Strategies of Psychosocial Support at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), as well as earning an MA in Immigration, Asylum and Intercommunity Relations from UAM. As an activist, she is a human rights advocate with a commitment to feminisms.

María Ángeles Fernández Páez is an artist and researcher who is part of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Mediation team. She holds a degree in Fine Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), the latter in a collaboration with the Autonomous University of Madrid and Museo Reina Sofía. She is currently studying a PhD in Fine Arts at UCM, where she also conducts research into new emotional politics in the technosphere.

Marlene Gildemeister is a mother, an anti-racist feminist, cross-border mixed race, a counter-academic, an artisan, an educator and a social archaeologist in a constant process of decolonisation. She holds an MA in Specific Didactics in Classrooms, Museums and Natural Spaces from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).