Situated Voices 10

Inside the framework of Museo Situado, a network of collaboration with different migrant collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and the Museo Reina Sofía, this new edition of Situated Voices explores the different artistic and feminist approaches to the notion of debt, understood as an instrument of economic, political and cultural domination. In this respect, debt alludes to, on the one side, States’ foreign debts, leaving them without agency and at the service of external economic interests; and, on the other, to a widespread mechanism of social control in the contemporary world, delineating what is gradually becoming known as “the factory of the indebted man”.

This activity is organised in dialogue with the project Pincha tu Deuda (Pierce Your Debt), developed by Grigri Projects and Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana, both of which look to kindle and conduct actions and alliances to debate how foreign debt operates in different countries and the tools citizens can employ to combat the effects. 

Debt has a deeper impact on women given that the assets and public services that cease to become available on account of the prioritisation of debt payments are related to care, which mainly falls on women. Among other issues, this situation brings about instability and forces migration towards the North. From this perspective, therefore, the encounter brings together different experiences from Senegal and Argentina, two countries adversely affected by foreign debt, which works today to drive unequal capital accumulation all over the world.      

Senegal-based Martinique photographer Elise Fitte-Duval, who creates portraits from the everyday world in her work, and Senegalese activist Khady Diouf, a specialist in migration, will analyse the problem of debt in their country and on the African continent, in addition to its origins, the consequences entailed and the possible channels to demand a more equal global economy.

For their part, the Argentinian feminist group Ni una menos (Not One Less) will put forward an audiovisual synthesis of the research project Una lectura feminista de la deuda: ¡Vivas, libres y desendeudadas nos queremos! (A Feminist Reading of Debt: We Want to Be Alive, Free and Debt-free!), conceived as a collective tool for understanding why the problem of States’ and subjects’ structural debts are linked to violence against feminised bodies.

Participants

Majo Castells is a designer and ceramicist. She participates in the design, cultural revitalisation and project coordination of Grigri Projects, a project devoted to research, creation and cultural production and with a sphere of action in participatory design, urban intervention and transdisciplinary community processes. She is currently working as a producer and coordinator on the project Pincha tu Deuda (Pierce Your Debt).

Khady Diouf is a migration specialist and an activist against female genital mutilation with the Union of Families Association (UNAF). She holds an MA in International Relations and in Spanish Language and Literature from the Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar University (UCAD). Her intervention preparations on this occasion feature the collaboration of Fatou Binetou Mbaye, Lala Konaté and Batouly Rahmatoulay Ly. 

Elise Fitte-Duval is a Martinique-born photographer who lives in Senegal. A graduate from the Martinique École d'Arts Plastiques (DNAP) and École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs (EnsAD) in Paris, she won a Casa África award at the Bamako Photography Biennale as best African female photographer in 2011 for her series Vivre les pieds dans l'eau, on the floods in Dakar.

Verónica Gago is a militant feminist, a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of San Martín and a member of the publishing house Tinta Limón; Luci Cavallero is a militant feminist and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Both are members of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos (Not One Less). In 2019, they published Una lectura feminista de la deuda: ¡Vivas, libres y desendeudadas nos queremos! (A Feminist Reading of Debt: We Want to Be Alive, Free and Debt-free), a book which assembles militant research, and, for this occasion, both have prepared an audiovisual synthesis of the project, to be presented by Argentinian artist and activist Guillermina Mongan.