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December 11, 2015 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Presentation of the archive participants
Moderator: Marisa Pérez Colina (Fundación de los Comunes)
Those interested in attending must register beforehand at: centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es
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December 11, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Conferences
Nancy Kranich. Reclaiming the Commons: Countering Enclosure of our Archival Heritage [30 min]
Digital technologies offer unprecedented possibilities for human creativity, global communication, innovation, and access to information and knowledge. Yet these same technologies also provide new opportunities to control—or enclose— intellectual products, threatening to erode political discourse, scientific inquiry, free speech, and the creativity needed for healthy democratic discourse. To counter such enclosure, scholars, technologists, and research institutions are working together to develop information commons that promise new models for stimulating innovation, fostering creativity, and building a movement that embodies knowledge as a shared resource.
Librarians and archivists have spearheaded this movement to counter enclosure of information commons by not only opposing access controls but also developing and adopting new, exciting approaches to sharing information and advancing knowledge. They are developing new structures that promote more open access to information resources across collections, platforms and repositories. Through these efforts, they are harnessing the power and potential of technology to democratize access, thereby realizing both the metaphor and reality of information commons. To move forward, a multidisciplinary collaborative effort is needed to advance information commons that adopt open standards and collaborative governance structures in order to enable sustainable global resource sharing in the 21st century.
Ariella Azoulay. Procedurally Speaking: No Archives of the Common Without Trans-Border Restitution [30 min]
With the creation of state archives, we have been made foreign, often untrusted guests to the archives. Performing our right to these archives is one way to demonstrate that archives are not about the past but about the common. Under five centuries old imperial condition, this right can practically be performed mainly by citizens or residents of sovereign states. It can hardly be practiced by people living in formerly colonized countries in which, during centuries of imperial rule, cultural treasures were looted and expropriated, and much of this plunder was transferred and continued to be stored and displayed in archives and museums of the former imperial powers. Under the imperial condition, the dispossession of those people from their art objects and cultural infrastructures and from archival documents they have right to use, has been followed by system of borders and fences that deprive former colonized subjects from access to the sites where these treasures are stored. Under this condition, a claim to have archives of the commons, should be inseparable from the claim to restitute portions of these archives to the countries where the looting, plunder, and expropriation took place.
Break
Jorge Reina Schement. Meeting the Challenge of Meaningful Access: Connectivity, Capability, Content, and Context [30 min]
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to share information in new and expanded ways. But making information available in any given format will not, by itself, guarantee meaningful access, especially for those groups lacking or not familiar with the technologies of access necessary to retrieve the information. A community must marshal resources to make the most of the potential offered by access. For communities to exploit the benefits of access, they must mobilize connectivity, capability, content, and context—the 4C's of access.
By conceptualizing the Internet as a pluralistic domain that includes the broader context in which technical components are embedded, we explicitly connect social with technical to conceptualize the Internet as an interdependent, socio-technical network. In so doing, we emphasize the importance of context in determining community-level interventions, as well as recognize the inherent difficulty in developing “best practices” that can be applied validly across diverse settings. Thus, the goal of connectivity, which is at the heart of most policies aimed at increasing access and, represents but a small first step toward functional access and empowerment. Capability, content, and context must be woven into any strategy seeking to achieve a better informational future for all.
William Gambetta. Archives of movement: between cultural reflection and social unrest [30 min]
If memory is a way of building social domination in the field of the imaginary and the symbolic, then the archive of movements, which has played a vital role in history but has also been defeated as a political actor capable of organising the prevalent institutionalism in production and its conservation, must operate with diverse constructed logics. These are defined and implemented in the specific conditions in which this dispute is disentangled by a sense of past and present. In these times of marked social unrest, of vast technological innovations and intense mutations in social actors’ political subjectivity, the archive of movements becomes a greater problem in inventing the future in terms of collective action and the activation of social energy. Therefore, this memory of movements is paramount to debating the possible lines of action aimed at inventing other forms of institutional, social and political organisation and other models of co-existence and human relationality.
The task of archives of movements is to keep spaces for reflection and social constitution open - these have been historically opened in order to use the repository of experience in the debate on the possible directions of social transformation in the present. The activation of these repositories of experience has ties to cartography, commitment and the accessibility of the materials, narratives and micro-histories belonging to those involved in their existence. The fragmentary nature and dispersion of movements have not historically implied either a lack of coherence or intelligibility in contributions to social transformation; thus the archive of movements represents a basic mechanism of social constitution today.
Question and answer session
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December 12, 2015 Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Workshop Sessions
Archive policies and forms of institution
10:00 - 12:00 a.m.
Moderator: Mela Dávila (Museo Reina Sofía)
The archives of the commons must be imagined beyond the principles of exclusive and identity heritage, simultaneously combining the reality of being founded in local and politically positioned experience and the chance to be appropriated, activated and distributed in different modes, without its value being spuriously perverted. Accordingly, it must redefine its institutional structure and conceptual architecture, adapting to this collective, conceivable, open and variable nature.
Archive economies
12:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Moderator: Mabel Tapia (Red Conceptualismos del Sur)
The State has traditionally been the guarantor of material continuity and the archive economy, with this presence one of its defining characteristics. The archives of the commons is based on the withdrawal of this guarantee, yet it also has to search for logics of continuity and dissemination in a context of institutional instability, economic insecurity and the discontinuity of the specific agents it is founded upon.
Techno-political mechanisms of the common archive
4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Moderator: Roxu Álvarez (Fundación de los Comunes)
Technological forms of archive cannot be separated from their political dimension; the Internet has become an archive in one of the central battlefields in contemporary societies. The generation of technological devices enabling exposure, hybrid and changeable taxonomies, and their collective production, as well as universal access, is a condition of possibility for the archives of the commons.
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December 12, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Round-table Discussion. The future of memory and the expropriation of the political sense of the present
Participants: Nancy Kranich, Ariella Azoulay, Jorge Reina Schement, William Gambetta and representants of the archives participants
Moderator: Carlos Prieto del Campo (Museo Reina Sofía)
Archives of the commons
Held on 11, 12 Dec 2015
In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse. This line of research into the archive and memory of subordinate and dominant groups sets forth a powerful line of reflection on new political rights and the new characteristics of a genuinely democratic sphere that is currently traversed by a multifactorial sense of crisis with far-reaching effects on the types of collective behaviour in our societies.
Archives of the commons shines a spotlight on these debates and lines of work in an international seminar organised into tables for discussion and public presentations. It is structured around three core principles of reflection: the archive models and institutional forms that make it possible, laying out a broad cartography of repository initiatives created between the 1970s and the present day; the economies of archive and the methods and protocols that ensure its dissemination and sustainability; the possible techno-political tools for undertaking its organisation, conceived as instruments that guarantee exposure, dynamic taxonomies and universal access, an indispensable condition of common archives. Therefore, the seminar will address institutional, technological and economic models that promote the different archives brought together, transversally debating these divergent records of experience and thought via the synthesis of the local and international, the individual and the collective.
With support from the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI)
Related links
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación de los Comunes and Red Conceptualismos del Sur
With the support of
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
12 DIC 2025
This second instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common space, comprises three sessions with Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker Christian Nyampeta and Ècole du soir. The programme’s first session screens video works made by Nyampeta, while the second sets forth a dialogue on the creative processes of Ècole du soir. The third brings proceedings to a close with the screening of a film selected by the artist: Ousmane Sembène’s Guelwaar (1992).
The work of Christian Nyampeta encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
The New York-based artist from Rwanda uses art and museums to create spaces of encounter and common learning that predate colonial education models. Via popular culture frames of reference like comics, music and film, Nyampeta develops dynamics and spaces from which to build experiences which redress the wounds of diaspora and its consequences; further, his work recovers, makes visible and heals — through a pedagogical and artistic process — the social divides of the African people. With Ècole du soir he also works on creations without authorship and uses the counter-ethnographic legacy of novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembène as a tool to deconstruct the Western view of Africa.