Program
Friday, 27 April - 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
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Lecture
Six Contradictions and the End of the Present. Franco Berardi Bifo
Subversion or Barbarism. The End of the World as We Know it
A shot from the film Comunismo futuro (Future Communism, 2017), by Andrea Gropplero and featuring Franco Berardi Bifo
Date and time
Held on 27 abr 2018
Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist. Committed to the 1970s Autonomia movements in Italy, his thinking dissects the implications of the Internet, from its advent, as a social and cultural phenomenon. He also founded the first pirate radio stations at the end of the 1970s as one of the driving forces behind Radio Alice, a station which married ideas and actions from the Movement of 1977 in Italy, and in the early 2000s his activism culminated in the first “street television” in Italy against media monopolies. Bifo is the author of a body of work with far-reaching references and connections, most notably his view of existential malaise and contemporary psychological disorders — depression, attention deficit – epidemics stemming from the capitalist production system. Furthermore, he is known for his concept of the artistic and creative side of resistance and his analysis of the profound effects of “financial and digital abstraction”, applying it to the expansion of financial exchange and virtual logic in every aspect of our life, bodies and quotidian time.
On this occasion, Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017).
The lecture will see the author of La fábrica de la infelicidad (The Factory of Unhappiness, Traficantes de sueños, 2003) explore new forms of power and domination, characterised by brutality, mass audiences and intangibility, which are imposed so naturally and trivially that their intellectual understanding and political contestation are unattainable. The workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author. 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?
Activity included in the programme
Participants
Franco Berardi Bifo is an Italian Marxist theorist whose involvement in the Autonomia Operaria movement in the 1970s in Italy marked the start of a prolific body of critical work — Contro il lavoro (1970), for instance — focused on the end of industrial society and the advent of a new social and cultural landscape organised around new detached subjectivities, both in the forms and prototypes of Fordism and the authoritarian management of modernity. A member of the collective A/Traverso and a participant in Radio Alice, some of his numerous publications have been translated into Spanish and English, for instance La fábrica de la infelicidad (The Factory of Unhappiness, Traficantes de sueños, 2003), The Uprising (Semiotext(e), 2012), After the Future (AK Press, 2016), The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Semiotext(e), 2016) and And: Phenomenology of the End (Semiotext(e), 2017).
Andrea Gropplero de Troppenburg is an Italian film-maker who graduated in television directing at CFP, Modena, in 1988, and film directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma, in 1991. His documentaries include Quando l'Italia mangiava in bianco e nero (2014), and most recently Comunismo futuro (2017).
Saturday, 28 April - 11am / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
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Research Workshop
Film screening: Comunismo futuro (2017, Italy, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 72’) and a conversation with the film-makers: Franco Berardi Bifo, screenwriter and narrator, and Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, director.
![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.