Studies Constellation. Sven Lütticken

The annual fellowship Studies Constellation invites key thinkers in the history of contemporary art and theory to develop and constellate an annual research project around some of the questions that encourage the intellectual engagement of art, culture, and the museum with the present.

The fellowship is conceived as a space for sustained, generative and expansive exchange that adopts different intensities and rhythms, combining in-person activities at the museum, including internal seminars and public presentations, with time for preparation, collection, rest and digestion outside the museum.

This programme is part of the commitment and responsibility of the Museo Reina Sofía's Study Directorship as a space for cultural production and exchange with the different research contexts in which it is involved.

Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction

In his 1975 essay On Practice, artist Mel Ramsden warned that the way in which the (art) market ‘shapes human relationships’ had become a factor of mass control, as its logic had been widely internalised by its various actors. Exchange value connects people at the same time as it separates them and pits them against each other as competitors. The capitalist world-system has colonised life in an unprecedented way, not only through the form of value — that real abstraction analysed by Marx — but also through what we might call the “juridical form” or “legal form”.

Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction draws on these contemporary debates and the experiences and histories that precede them to address how dominant abstract forms—exchange value and legal form—shape our social relations under capitalism, while establishing hierarchies of access to rights. Legal form, in particular, shapes subjectivities and relationships by dividing the world between people and properties, normalising the white male property owner as the exclusive bearer of reason and law.

Faced with this reality, the project proposes to explore how relationships and subjectivities could be performed—represented, interpreted, embodied—in other ways. Following artist Andrea Fraser, who uses the term enactment to describe how relational structures are produced and reproduced in all kinds of activities, one possibility would be to develop practices that ‘put them into action’ in different ways—or even deactivate them—with varying degrees of patience, contradiction, and commitment. From this perspective, critiques of legal or monetary abstraction must be part of practices that embrace failure: the failure of interpellation and identification. In this sense, concepts from the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s can still be useful. One of these is the concept of “unlearning privilege” proposed by Gayatri Spivak, or José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “disidentification”, understood as a survival strategy for minority subjects in the face of a majority sphere that constantly renders invisible or punishes those who do not conform to the normative ideal of citizenship.

In short, this annual research project focuses on the ways in which artists, activists, and theorists confront legal abstraction and the dominance of legal form. In many cases, pragmatic interventions within existing legal frameworks are required to defend fundamental rights, especially in contexts of increasing vulnerability. However, a broader perspective is also needed: a kind of slow abolitionism, based on unlearning and deactivating the privileges associated with personhood—a ‘legal status’ that has been granted to a few and denied to many. As Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki warns, ‘the units of survival will be local communities.’ From there, it is necessary to imagine fairer ways of living together, relating to one another and creating.

The research will be shared through a seminar entitled The (legal) person and the legal form. Theoretical, artistic and activist commitments -open by call and organised in three chapters-, as well as through conferences and public talks throughout the residency.