Towards a Socialism of Creation
Luis Camnitzer in conversation with María Acaso and Selina Blasco
Held on 17 oct 2018
Inside the framework of the retrospective Luis Camnitzer: Hospice of Failed Utopias (17 October 2018 to 4 March 2019) and the launch of the studies, residencies and cultural productions programme the Perturbable School, this encounter sees the artist touch on his conception of critical artistic pedagogy, not only in schools and universities but also museums, and on where this work of reflection fits into his own artistic career.
Luis Camnitzer (Lübeck, 1937) views conceptual art as a practice of political intervention in a repressed public sphere. This occurs in his art and curation work, demonstrated by the influential landmark exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s (conceived with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss at New York’s Queens Museum in 1999). In the same manner, Camnitzer is one of the most incisive thinkers with regard to the relationship between art and education, an issue which has led him to consider the different possibilities in the museum institution, the art object, spectators and even the role of art.
Upon what are his ideas of education and art based? In opposition with predominant ideas, which see learning as being contingent upon an explanation of the art work, Camnitzer endorses the integration of both, thus enabling this traditional dependency to be subverted and seeking alternatives to market logic, where art is conceived to produce the art object and education is viewed as training towards a particular end. According to Camnitzer, in this new relationship “education is art and art is education”. This new idea of art, moreover, entails radically questioning the limits of the museum and the artwork; in the words of the artist, which lend this debate its name, “Liberating the spectator so they think about everything they do artistically, and helping them to create a socialism of creation”.
With the collaboration of
In the framework of
An education programme developed with the patronage of
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
María Acaso is head of Education at the Museo Reina Sofía. A teacher and theorist, her reflections include the concept of “educational revolution”, a method of action to develop an alternative teaching practice. Her publications include Art Thinking: un libro que revolucionará la manera de educar (2017) and La educación artística no son manualidades. Nuevas prácticas en la enseñanza de las artes y la cultura visual (2014), and she is the founder of Invisible Pedagogies, a collective of disruptive education.
Selina Blasco is a professor of Art History in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. The collective initiatives she has worked on include “Sin créditos” (Without Credits), a programme based on learning as an experimental process. She is also one of the academic coordinators in the MA on Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture run by the Museo Reina Sofía.
Luis Camnitzer is an artist, educator and theorist who has exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, the Whitney Museum and documenta, Kassel, to name but a few. Moreover, his work belongs to the Collections of MoMA (New York), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Tate Modern (London), the Blanton Museum (Austin, Texas), the Cisneros Collection (Caracas/New York) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). His publications most notably include Arte y Enseñanza: La ética del poder (2000) and Didáctica de la liberación. Arte conceptualista latinoamericano (2009), and he was the pedagogical curator at the 6th Mercosul Biennial and the Iberé Camargo Foundation (Porto Alegre) between 2007 and 2010.
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
UP/ROOTING
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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.
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