Activities

Copylove is a research project begun in 2012 by Rubén Martínez, Txelu Balboa and Sofía Coca that attempts to analyse and represent the relationships and tensions that arise between the commons and love within communities, between emotions and community links. 

At this program, the curators Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec present the premises of the exhibition ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts, followed by an intervention by Simone Forti in the auditorium and concluding with the representation of several of her pieces in the exhibition galleries. 

French sociologist Laurent Bonelli investigates the economic insecurity, riots and police repression that define the backdrop of the existence of a large part of the youth in the banlieu, the metropolitan outskirts of France. This conference questions and analyzes the creation of the new frontiers (spatial and moral) of an emerging social order and the resistance it generates. 

In this performative lecture, artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the realm of ecosexuality as an expanded field of queer politics. The ecosexual community is a rapidly growing community that includes artists, academics, sex workers and other entities from diverse walks of life. 

When trying to understand the impact that artistic practices have on the public sphere, people usually speak of a confrontation between art and politics. In this seminar, comprised of a lecture and a workshop, Brian Holmes takes a step beyond this dichotomy, and situates art, once again, in relation to existential affections, forms of organisation, bodies and theory. 

In this conference, Anglo-American historian Peter Linebaugh explores the cycle of municipal occupations and urban encampments of recent years in cities including Cairo, Athens, London, New York and Madrid. Rather than discuss such events within discourses of citizenship or the public, Linebaugh considers them within the historical framework of the commons.

The new direction taken by political and social happenings in recent years has once again made public space an excellent place for manifestations by the community. In contrast with the situation during the last third of the 20th century, dissident action does not avoid urban spectacularization, hiding in private or clandestine spheres. Instead it transforms and is shown in public space. This seminar explores the use of “theatrical” gestures, behaviours and performances in social space for the purpose of expressing disagreement and dissidence, and it also examines the way that today's art, specifically theatre, has taken in and dialogued with these non-artistic theatricalities.

Three mysterious occurrences in a city haunted by images, of people known to me, and others unknown. Images abandoned by their occupants; some have become ruins. An image is invaded, a new face moves in—sometimes an ally, sometimes an old foe. One vanishes, while another travels from one picture to another

Rabih Mroué.

Closely connected to the Computing Centre, the visual poet, experimental artist, researcher, professor and writer Ignacio Gómez de Liaño is one of the essential references in Spanish art in the 1970s. This book of memories recounts that period's most important events and describes many of their protagonists. The book, the Spanish title of which is En la red del tiempo 1972 -1977, constitutes an indispensable document in any effort to understand contemporary art practices in the final years of the dictatorship.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

The main purpose of universities is generally understood to revolve around teaching and research, but these institutions also have other important roles that tend to receive less attention. This event looks at the architectural and artistic heritage belonging to Spain's National University of Distance Education (UNED). The collection is brought together for the first time in this publication, which examines how contemporary art has been collected, exhibited and supported by the university as an institution.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault suggested that for each model of power there was a specific way of organising sexuality and reproduction and that this organisation was concentrated in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the factory. All of these are now in decline, so we must ask ourselves: What model of somatopolitial administration characterises contemporary neoliberal society, following the crisis occurring in Foucault's clinic? This lecture is the inaugural event of Somatheque 2013.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This lecture looks at the interaction between narrations of social and economic recession and narrations of the visual arts crisis since the 1960s. Do these stories take place in parallel or are they a form of cultural critique? How does the economic recession shape the perception and production of contemporary art? Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University and is also editor of the New Left Review.