Controllability refers to the possibility of steering a system from a given initial state to a desirable state with a given class of control inputs. In continuum mechanics, the control if usually affected by a body force or boundary conditions. Viscoelastic flows pose an interesting class of problems for which the linearized problem is only partly controllable, and the question to what extent nonlinear problems can be controlled is in general quite difficult. The lecture will review partial result on this topic which I have obtained over the past few years.