September 26–October 14, 2022
The ninth edition of the Independent Studies Programme (PEI), which will begin in March 2023 and last for four terms until June 2024, has been announced by the MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. From September 26 until October 14, 2022, applications for admission will be taken.
Under the heading Where Are the Oases?, this new edition is directed by Kader Attia, Elvira Dyangani Ose and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and brings together lecturers, guests and allied agents such as Franco Berardi (Bifo), Houria Bouteldja, La Colonie nomade, Susana Pilar Delahante, Elvira Espejo Ayca, Grupo Etcétera, Malcom Ferdinand, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Verónica Gago, María Galindo, Nancy Garín, Cristina Goberna Pesudo, Paz Guevara, Bouchra Khalili, Rachida Madani, Achille Mbembe, Sara Nutall, PCP (Programa Cultura Política), Rolando Vázquez, Françoise Vergés and Octavio Zaya.
The programme also aims to work with collectives such as Archivo Ovni, Equipo Palomar, Kas Kultural Arts Society (Awa Konaté), Diversorium (Antonio Centeno & María Oliver), Living Commons, Cooperativa Periferia Cimarronas, Radio Cavaret, Radio Web MACBA and members of Red Pluridiversidad Nómada, among others.
The Independent Studies Programme (PEI), which was founded in 2006, has served as a tool for education and institutional criticism by providing a forum for the generation of critical and group thought that is based on the interactions between artistic practices, social sciences, and political intervention.
The PEI is presented as a program that is interdependent and committed to the sociopolitical realities and settings that surround it. Over the course of 16 years, more than 250 students from 30 different countries have taken part, creating connections and weaving networks between local projects, international activists, and artistic communities. In this way, the PEI views political activity and creative inquiry as complementary approaches that bring together various types of information, representational systems, and social codification. The PEI gives a history of institutions, understood as a history of the human, the social, and the political that we collectively establish, rather than just a history of art.
Where Are the Oases?
Asking knowing that we are going through a process of climatic, social, and political desertification implies asking, “Where Are the Oases?” Our surroundings are always changing in ways that are harmful to life. A system that regulates death in order to monetize life is neoliberal capitalism and its logic of accumulation through the maximal exploitation of natural and human resources. What remains of the promise of a free world and a happy existence is threatened by the environmental collapse, the severe public health crisis, the hate culture, and the never-ending state of conflict that define the geopolitics of the present.
Where Are The Oases? implies seeking for areas and procedures that can fend against this desertification and life-draining process. It entails posing the following queries to ourselves: Where do we wish to resist, and how? What are the areas that we desire to claim as our own? What are the commons’ hours? How can we coexist as though the society we desire already exists?
Where Are the Oases?, the ninth edition of the PEI, is built on a study and appreciation exercise of earlier editions and forms. It then leverages this contemplation to construct a conceptual approach that both ensures continuity and updates it.
MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
08001 Barcelona
Spain
[email protected]
www.macba.cat
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