Program
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Monday, 26 March - 7:00 pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Lecture
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Tuesday, 27 March - 12:00 pm / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Research workshop
Six Contradictions and the End of the Present. Evgeny Morozov
Digital Capitalism and Discontent
A Google server farm used to store Big Data. Photograph, 2016
Date and time
Held on 26, 27 mar 2018
The meteoric rise of digital giants worldwide has posed a raft of unsettling questions on the concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of tech brokers. After relatively innocuous beginnings in the fields of advertising and online shopping, technology companies have expanded the range of their operations to offer an ever-growing array of services, many maintained by powerful artificial intelligence tools that feed off our data, hailing from areas as divergent as cybersecurity and health care.
Many observers put this meteoric rise down to the founders’ business and technological genius. Yet in the face of this individualist mythology comes the pressing need for us to make a critical reading of a situation whose hegemony can be explained through the vacuums and breaches left by obliging approaches to technology built in a new period ushered in after the Cold War. Only by comprehending the historical-political context in which this new technological capacity emerged can we be in a position to elucidate the urgent question of how to restrict and tame this new form of social and political power. If it’s still possible, that is.
This session will analyse and discuss the possible alternatives to this invisible and all-powerful government of the algorithm and Big Data, ranging from the design of new data ownership models to algorithms being subjected to audits, via the creation of cooperate platforms or the comprehensive nationalisation of technology platforms.
Workbook, with the following texts
«Socializad los centros de datos», New Left Review; 91, 2015
«Introducción», Capitalismo Big Tech. ¿Welfare o neofeudalismo digital?, Madrid, Enclave de libros, 2018
«Internet como ideolog ía», Capitalismo Big Tech. ¿Welfare o neofeudalismo digital?, Madrid, Enclave de libros, 2018
«Digital Intermediation of Everything: at the Intersection of Politics, Technology and Finance», Empowering Democracy through Culture – Digital Tools for Culturally Competent Citizens, 4th Council of Europe Platform Exchange on Culture and Digitisation, Center for Art and Media, Karslruhe, 2017
«El activismo digital en la política de la post Guerra Fría», La era de la perplejidad: Repensar el mundo que conocíamos, Madrid, BBVA, OpenMind, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2017
Activity included in the programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Evgeny Morozov is one of the sharpest critics of the social and political models that stem from the effects of Big Data. He is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011), To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Affairs (PublicAffairs, 2011), and Capitalismo Big-Tech, ¿welfare o neofeudalismo? (Enclave de Libros, 2018). He also writes a monthly column on technology and politics in The Observer (UK) and his contributions regularly appear in European and US publications, from The New Yorker and The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. The former editor-in-chief of The New Republic (USA), he has taught at Georgetown University and Stanford University, at the Open Society and New America Foundations and at the American Academy in Berlin.
![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.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
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.
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.