Populism. A Dialogue on Art, Representation and Institutions in the Crisis of Democracy
A Conversation between Chantal Mouffe and Didier Eribon
Roberto Jacoby. 1968: el culo te abrocho. Cartel intervenido, 2008
Held on 08 jun 2017
In recent years, the museum confederation L’Internationale, made up of Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Antwerp), the Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), SALT (Istanbul), the Museu d’ Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), has been investigating the instability of the current geopolitical and ecological configuration of the contemporary world, striving to activate the values of culture and international collaboration as potential resistance. What single contribution can museums and cultural institutions offer to counteract the crisis hitting the current globalised and fragmented society? How can research, dialogue and the difference between cultural institutions be devised constructively to forge long-lasting ties between different communities? The upshot of this line of work is the advent of the public programme Dialogues, a series of conversations programmed in different member museums, and the touchstone of this activity.
Dialogues invites eminent thinkers, artists, activists and cultural workers to debate four theoretical strands: Who is speaking? Representation and non-representation on (art) policies today; What is right? Populism in an era of post-truth; What needs to change? Transformations and institutions’ futures; Where is the South? Knowledge and epistemology from the Global South. Revolving around the first two axes, and gaining momentum towards the third, this conversation approaches the term “populism”. If there is one conclusion that can be drawn from the writings on this notion, then it involves at once an unsatisfactory definition and becomes the target of the most compounded attacks, at the same time as it evokes the most imaginative possibilities of representative democracy and its institutions. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe and philosopher Didier Eribon do not seek to define the term as a universal category, but look to present two opposing concepts of it, and, ultimately, explore the relationship it bears with the space of representation and the mobilisation of culture and the museum institution.
At one end, Chantal Mouffe upholds that liberal democracy proceeds from two conflicting ideas: liberal freedom versus equality. The confrontation of these two incompatible traditions means that political space is, in her words, an “agonistic” place. In recent decades, the predominance of financial capital has been so absolute that it has displaced and cancelled out the antagonism of these two historical options, and in this post-political setting Mouffe asserts that rethinking such frontiers is essential; not so much between left and right, but between the oligarchy and the society dispossessed in this process. Art and its institutions, in their capacity of collective representation, play a key role in this tract. At the other end, Didier Eribon wholly rejects the new binary opposites between those at the top and those at the bottom, scotching their uniformity in the excess of a complex and diverse social body, and maintaining a return to the notion of difference and the critique of the place of enunciation (those who speak and from where), characterising the so-called cultural wars from the 1970s. Both authors will, first and foremost, present these two positions before debating them.
Framework
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Chantal Mouffe. Philosopher and political theorist. She is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, and has been guest professor at Harvard, Cornell, the University of California, Princeton, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Between 1989 and 1995 she was director of the College International de Philosophie Programme in Paris, and is the author of a range of noteworthy publications, translated into multiple languages, on the space of democracy linked to the fight for pluralism. Her numerous essays include Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, with Ernesto Laclau (1985),On the Political (2005) and Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically (2014).
Didier Eribon. Philosopher and sociologist. As a lecturer at the University of Amiens, he is the author of Michel Foucault (1992), the most complete intellectual biography on the philosopher to date, Reflections on the Gay Question (2001), A Moral of the Minority (2004), Escaping Psychoanalysis (2008), and Return to Reims (2013). Moreover, his work is an example of dissident prose, understood as a confrontation between the canon and the norm.
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work 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.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.