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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
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
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 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.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.