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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
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.