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26 and 27 March
Evgeny Morozov
Digital Capitalism and Discontent
Monday, 26 March, 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
LectureTuesday, 27 March, 12 noon / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Research workshopThe meteoric rise of the digital giants has been put down to the founders’ business and technological genius by numerous critics, yet still it poses a raft of questions surrounding the concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of technology brokers. There is a pressing need to have a critical diagnosis of the situation at hand in order to explain this period in terms of the geopolitical vacuums created in the aftermath of the Cold War. This session will analyse and discuss the traits of this new abstract government of the algorithm and Big Data, in addition to the possible alternatives to this new condition i.e. other models that differ from data ownership, subjecting algorithms to the corresponding audits and creating corporate tech platforms.
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27 and 28 April
Franco Berardi Bifo
Subversion or Barbarism. The End of the World as We Know it
Friday, 27 April, 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
LectureSaturday, 28 April
11am / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Research workshop7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Film screening: Comunismo futuro (2017, Italy, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 72’)Conversation with the film-makers:
Franco Berardi Bifo, screenwriter and narrator, and Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, directorIn this series of activities, Franco Berardi Bifo will explore and reveal new forms of power and domination, characterised by brutality, mass audiences and intangibility, which, according to Bifo, are imposed so naturally and trivially that their intellectual understanding and political contestation are unattainable. Thus, the debate between social majorities swings between the lack of possible futures and the difficulties of furnishing life itself with plausible existential meaning. As a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro, an urgent call to the most idiosyncratic political approach of the twentieth century, thereby elucidating its possibilities in the twenty-first century. Is collective intelligence feasible at a time of connected intelligence?
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6 and 7 June
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Yayo Herrero
Raciality and Care in the Dispute Over Other Lives
Wednesday, 27 June, 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
LectureWednesday, 29 June, 6pm / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Research workshop featuring the participation of different collectivesThis session led by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Yayo Herrero explores the conflict between life and neoliberalism as a result of past clashes between capital and work. Traditionally, this concept has referred to the exploitation of work and the wage earner, while its contemporary version assumes that this exploitation does not affect salaried activities exclusively, but life itself. Therefore, from an ecofeminist and antiracist perspective, the session considers the possibility of other subjectivities outside the production logics of economistic value. With this in mind, Yayo Herrero will discuss how care has become precarious and is circumscribed to women and the home; essential yet excluded from social consideration, while Taylor will focus on contemporary racism in the USA as the structural effect of a system which seeks to create a state of terror bound to supremacy through division and control.
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12 and 13 September
Trebor Scholz and Tiziana Terranova
Overexploited and Underpaid. Free Work, Insecurity, and Creation
Wednesday, 12 September, 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
LectureThursday, 13 September, 11am / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Research workshopIn this session Trebor Scholz and Tiziana Terranova will explore new logics in force in the world of production and digital and cognitive work, as well their technological correlates and the relationship they bear to new models of social organisation. What are the impact and possibilities of new digital tools and what are the consequences of ownership models by the major technology conglomerates? The opportunities offered by new technological organisation applied to social reproduction will be analysed, as will the state of the current and future workforce, which has created a new work and citizen paradigm, in which the artist, in his or her continual, precarious and undervalued work not only participates but is also a clear precursor.
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27 and 28 November
Paul Mason
Postcapitalism. A Guide for the Present Future
Tuesday, 27 November, 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Lecture. PostCapitalismWednesday, 28 November
10am / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Research workshop. From Resistance to Postcapitalist Politic7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Film screening: Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (2017), UK, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 59’) and a conversation with the director, Paul MasonIn Mason’s view, systematic trends of neoliberal capitalism are having a huge impact on current societies, making the emergence of citizen interventions that are both original and radical and comparable to capitalist intervention even more urgent. Mason argues that technology includes a potentially subversive organisational matrix with new options and practices which must be obtained for social emancipation. The corollary of this thinking is that the future is already here and the present is a threatening past and future.
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Postponed to 2019, new date will be announced soon
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Decolonising the Mind. Postcolonialism and Other Possible Worlds
Lecture and research workshopIn recent decades, new postcolonial subjects have burst into Western societies’ political systems, altering the logic of European states. Therefore, this session will analyse the forms which generate this destabilisation from the recognition of different types of citizenship, as well as examining theoretical models of the dominant postcolonial theories at the present time, attempting to explain the appearance of other subjects, narratives, bodies and knowledge in societies —subjects that end up being culturally unassimilable and unrecognisable as political and historical agents.
Six Contradictions and the End of the Present
Held on 28 nov 2018
This seminar of public lectures, film screenings and research workshops explores how contemporary capitalism, in its galloping escalation and capacity to assimilate and produce aspects of private life, works through contradiction as a mechanism of regulation and adaptation. In recent years, the dominant social model has verifiably stopped functioning in alignment with normality based on stability, welfare, growth and identity, all defined in the aftermath of the Second World War. Conversely, today this normalcy assumes an inscrutable and unpredictable state, devoid of expectation and a source of existential uncertainty. It is not just the future that has slipped from the social imagination; the present is fragmented and has withdrawn into itself, with this same present mimicked by forms, spaces and subjectivities of capital in all its permutations in such a way that contemporary time is just another mode of production in this total regime.
Therefore, this programme seeks to provide critical tools to illuminate this hijacked present and to re-imagine a landscape that is under transformation. In contrast to previous decades, the aim is to unravel the complexities, folds and forms of resistance in our era, not to think of the future as a utopia. The series, alluding to 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014), a book by British geographer David Harvey, which explores how the neoliberal system is based on impossibility as a model of social reproduction, takes up the methodology of this study, employing contradiction to break away from the constant, serialised and homogenous time of contemporaneity.
Each of the six seminar sessions is put together in a double format: encompassing lectures, film screenings and public discussions on one side, and ongoing research workshops, readings and annual analysis on the other. It introduces a disruption to the core conditions of this paradigm, seeking to open dialectic possibilities in order to build a new present.
The first year will approach the following contradictions: the authoritarian impact of digital technology with Evgeny Morozov; the possibilities of art criticism as a tool for subjectivation and constitution with Franco Berardi Bifo; radical changes to employment and the new precarious class this gives rise to, with Tiziana Terranova and Trebor Scholz; the racial inequality as a persistent vector in social movements and care set apart from commodified values, conducted by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Yayo Herrero; the possible contours of a post-capitalist imagination, with Paul Mason; and, finally, the postcolonial subject and its perception as a historical actor at a time of immense inequality, on a socioeconomic level and in accounts and narratives, with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
Acknowledgements
Related activity
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8, 22 OCT, 5, 19 NOV, 3, 17, 31 DIC 2025,14, 28 ENE, 11, 25 FEB, 11, 25 MAR, 8, 22 ABR, 6, 20 MAY, 3, 17 JUN 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
Rethinking Guernica
21, 28, 22, 29 SEP, 5, 12, 19, 26, 6, 13, 20, 27 OCT, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 3, 10, 17, 24 NOV, 7, 14, 21, 28, 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 DIC 2025
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
29 SEP, 2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
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 two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of four sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes four sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios; and international law, through the work of British writer China Miéville.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.