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)
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