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MACBA Public Programs
pei@macba.cat
Tel. (+34) 934 817 900 |
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| | | - | 01/01/2010 - 31/12/2011
MACBA  |
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Independent Studies Program (PEI) 2010-2011 |
With the participation of Xavier Antich, Manuel Asensi, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Marcelo Expósito, David Harvey, Ana Longoni, Rita McBride, Chantal Mouffe, Francesc Muñoz, Beatriz Preciado, Jacques Rancière, John Rajchman, Emmanuel Rodríguez, Suely Rolnik and Allan Sekula, among others.
The Independent Studies Program (PEI) aims to explore the field of artistic practices that link art to the human sciences and to critical-social intervention. The Program seeks to enhance students’ capacity to participate in professional activities and their ability to articulate a critical position in regards to art and culture. By understanding art as the product of a convergence of different systems, social fields and areas of knowledge, the Program intends to generate ideas and conceptions that challenge the framework established by the neo-liberal technocracy.
Because neo-liberal ideology has transformed education into a marginal or innocuous agent, the PEI attempts to re-politicize education. This re-politicization is linked to its own “teaching” task. It dares to question the institutional education found in universities, the mainstream media, and even in schools and museums (as well as in other institutions involved in the process) and demands a revision of predominant assumptions in teaching. The first assumption the Program takes a stand against is the division of knowledge as practiced in our social system. The PEI constructs new spaces for political education. As such, the PEI represents a place for experimentation with the relationship between the museum and the public.
Museum studies. The PEI is a museum studies program with an international inclination. Based on the presumption that critical theory, education and the museum are inseparable vectors, it sets out to investigate all three fields. At a time when the institution has strengthened itself against the typical attacks of the avant-garde and the practices of institutional critique of the sixties and seventies, it now faces the need for redefinition with respect to the hegemony of consumption as the dominant thought in new cultural policies and industries since the eighties. In this context, the PEI understands that it is necessary to reconsider the meaning and significance of the museum as an institution rooted historically in an Enlightenment vision of popular education. Museum studies, therefore, is inseparable from the criticism of the processes of knowledge building and their policies.
Faced with the current proliferation of museums at the international level and with the predominant emphasis on management models whose effect is the hegemony of a notion of museums linked to mass entertainment industries, the PEI aims to offer an alternative space. This alternative is based on the rejection of notions of management and their techniques as the centre of the museum space. In contrast, it focuses on notions of discourse and education, and always from a multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, the field of museum studies is indivisible from the criticism of knowledge production processes and their policies, which is based on the observation of the museum’s centrality in modern culture.
The PEI aims to foster critical professional activity in the field of art and cultural activity capable of innovating and experimenting in both the institutional and social space.
Program and subjects. The PEI structures art, art criticism, political action, gender technology and economic and urban sciences in a program that combines the different discursive lines that have been unfolding in the museum in recent years. Interconnected, mobile work spaces and a wide variety of activities constitute the Program.
The PEI is a two-year long program divided into seven subject areas, and includes a total of 480 hours divided among theoretical and practical classes and seminars. There will be a monographic workshop every two weeks in order to emphasize continuity among the different disciplines. | | | - | | Program | |
ACADEMIC CALENDAR
The academic structure of the Program is organized by terms. Each term focuses on one subject, which consists of one or two classes per week, a seminar and a series of open lectures, except in the case of “Critical Theory” which is considered a core subject of the PEI and is present throughout the entire two-year period.
Thus, each term consists of:
› Two subjects with classes on Thursdays and Fridays from 6 pm to 9 pm
› Two seminar series or lectures open to the public, which will be given from 6 pm on weekdays or on Saturdays
› A 3-hour group workshop with one or two intensive work sessions of variable duration
Times are subject to change
SUBJECTS
Critical Theory. Constitutes the backbone of the program (it is part of all six terms) and addresses the different methodologies, meta-languages and tools which history has constructed to approach the institution of art.
Political Imagination. Explores the link between aesthetic activity and forms of political action, going beyond insufficient notions of art as well as of politics.
Economy and Culture. Seeks to investigate what has come to be called cognitive capitalism, a radical change of paradigm which is characterized by the centrality of immaterial and cognitive dimensions (among them, culture) in the processes of accumulation and value production.
Post-urban Architecture. Today’s cities reveal themselves with increasing clarity as diffuse and complex wholes which acquire their true dimensions as meeting places and obstacles for the general trends of globalization and the particular pre-existing aspects of the local.
Gender Technologies. Study of the complex theoretical legacy deriving from feminist studies, which today constitute one of the central themes of any analysis of visibility.
Strategies of Desire. The convergences and divergences between spaces of artistic creativity and those of psychotherapy, critically overcoming the softer forms of constructing the artistic space discursively, not as a compensatory space of social deficiencies but rather as a space for radical otherness.
Art, Visibility and Representation. This subject now covers a more extensive area for the study of art and visibility which, rather than being limited to historiographical discourse, begins with the understanding that art generates a specific form of knowledge and culture which needs to be addressed in a broader, cross-cutting and multidisciplinary way.
2010-2011 PROGRAM
FIRST TERM January-March 2010
Political Imagination
Reformulations of artistic activism and institutional criticism
Coordination: Marcelo Expósito
Critical Theory
Marxisms and neo-Marxisms
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
SECOND TERM April-June 2010
Post-urban architecture
Scenarios on the future of the city
Coordination: Francesc Muñoz
Critical Theory
New forms of subjectivation: The public, the social sphere and post-colonial theory
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
THIRD TERM September-December 2010
Gender technologies: Counter-biopolitical struggles in the 20th century – Feminism and queer theory
Coordination: Beatriz Preciado
Theory and critical discourse
Ginocepts and queercepts
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
FOURTH TERM January-March 2011
Art, visibility and representation
Archive, document, historiography
Coordination: Allan Sekula and Ana Longoni
Critical Theory
Formalisms: From formalism to aesthetic analysis, phenomenology, structuralism and semiotics
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
FIFTH TERM April-June 2011
Strategies of desire
Art, politics and therapy
Coordination: Suely Rolnik
Critical Theory
Art, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
SIXTH TERM September-December 2011
Economy and culture
Cognitive capitalism
Coordination: Emmanuel Rodríguez
Critical Theory
Foucauldian strategies and deconstruction
Coordination: Manuel Asensi and Xavier Antich
Faculty and Guest Lecturers
Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Marcelo Expósito, David Harvey, Ana Longoni, Rita McBride, Chantal Mouffe, Francesc Muñoz, Beatriz Preciado, Jacques Rancière, John Rajchman, Emmanuel Rodríguez, Suely Rolnik and Allan Sekula, among others.
Academic director: Xavier Antich
Assistant director: Manuel Asensi
FACULTY PROFILES
Xavier Antich has a doctorate in Philosophy, is professor of Aesthetics and Director of the Master’s program in Communication and Art Criticism at the University of Girona. He won the Joan Fuster Essay Prize for the book entitled
El rostre de l’altre. Passeig filosòfic per l’obra d’Emmanuel Lévinas, and the Espais a la Creación y a la Crítica de Arte Prize, an international award, for an essay about the artist Aureli Ruiz. He has published a book on the metaphysics of Aristotle and several translations of contemporary philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Franco Rella and Chantal Mouffe. He is author of some eighty articles published in specialized journals and collective publications, basically on various questions of philosophy, aesthetics and contemporary art, and has written catalogue texts on the work of numerous contemporary artists. He forms part of the editorial board of the magazines L’espill (Valencia) and Trame (Venice), as well as of the cultural supplement Cultura/s of the newspaper La Vanguardia.
Manuel Asensi is a professor of Literary Theory in the Philology Department of the University of Valencia and has been a visiting professor in different universities in Europe and the United States. He is Director of the Humanities Collection of the publishers Editorial Tirant lo Blanch. He is a cultural critic for the supplement Cultura/s of the newspaper La Vanguardia. His field of research is that of literary theory and criticism, Spanish literature, film and art criticism. His publications include Historia de la teoría de la literatura (2 volumes) and Los años salvajes de la teoría (Philippe Sollers, Tel Quel y la génesis del post-estructuralismo francés).
Marcelo Expósito is currently a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca and of the Elisava School in Barcelona. Between 2001 and 2006 he was co-editor of the magazine Brumaria, and currently collaborates with the editorial team on the Transform project and the on-line magazine transversal (www.transform.eipcp.net). He has published, individually or in conjunction with others, the books Plusvalías de la imagen; Chris Marker. Retorno a la inmemoria del cineasta; Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa; and Historias sin argumento. El cine de Pere Portabella. He has also participated in the research and publications of the Desacuerdos project. His work as an artist can be situated between theoretical practice, aesthetics and politics.
Beatriz Preciado is a philosopher and queer activist. She teaches at several Spanish and foreign universities, including the Paris VIII University - Saint-Denis, France. She is author of the book entitled Manifiesto contra-sexual and Testo Yonqui. Sexo, droga y biopolítica, and of numerous articles published in magazines such as Multitudes, Eseté and Artecontexto, as well as in catalogues and collective publications, such as Airs de Paris and Cold War/Hot Houses. Her latest book, Vigilar y complacer: arquitectura y pornografía en las casas Playboy is forthcoming.
Ana Longoni is a writer, CONICET researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where she received her PhD in Art. She coordinates the research team “¿La cultura como resistencia?: Lecturas desde la transición de producciones culturales y artísticas durante la última dictadura argentina”, located at the UBA’s “Gino Germani” Research Institute of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Among other works, she has published the following books as sole author or in collaboration with others: De los poetas malditos al video-clip (Cántaro, 1998); Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde (El cielo por asalto, 2000, republished by Eudeba, 2008); the preliminary study for Oscar Masottais’ book Revolución en el arte (Edhasa, 2004); one of the chapters of the anthology edited by Inés Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the Sixties: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York, MoMA, 2004); and Traiciones. La figura del traidor en los relatos acerca de los sobrevivientes de la represión (Norma, 2007). She also edited Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión (Siglo XXI, 2005) and El Siluetazo (Adriana Hidalgo, 2008).
Allan Sekula is an American artist, writer and critic. He is the author of Photography Against the Grain, Fish Story, Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, Dismal Science and The Traffic In Photographs. He has had solitary exhibitions in the Folkwang Museum (Essen), Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), University Art Museum (Berkeley), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tramway (Glasgow), Le Channel and the Muse des Beaux Arts (Calais), Camerawork (London), Munich Kunstverein (Munich), Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels) and Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). He is a professor in the Photography and Media Program at the California Institute for the Arts.
Francesc Muñoz holds a PhD in Geography and is a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He specialized in urban development, urban planning and the design of land use strategies. He has participated as an expert in Council of Europe missions related to these issues and has been a visiting professor at universities in France, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal, United Kingdom, Argentina and Mexico, where he published texts on the city and urban studies. His most recent work is the book urBANALización: Paisajes Comunes, Lugares Globales (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2008). He currently heads the Urban Development Observatory and the Master’s program on Intervention and Landscape Management at the UAB.
Emmanuel Rodríguez is part of the editing team at Traficantes de Sueños, a publishing house which specializes in books with a free or semi-free license. He studied history and sociology and received his PhD in contemporary history. He has promoted and participated in various collective research platforms linked to different social groups, including various publications produced by Traficantes de Sueños and the work of the Metropolitan Observatory of Madrid.
Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic and exhibition curator. She is a full professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where she coordinates the Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Subjectivation, part of the postgraduate degree in Clinical Psychology. She sought exile in Paris from 1970 to 1979 where, in addition to her psychoanalytical training she obtained diplomas in philosophy, social sciences and psychology. The beginning of her relationship with Deleuze and Guattari dates back to this period, as does her friendship with Lygia Clark, whose work entitled Estruturação del Self was the subject of her thesis in France (1978), a subject she has continued working with ever since. Rolnik’s main line of work is today’s subjectivation policies, approached from a cross-disciplinary point of view which, in recent years, has concentrated on contemporary art and its political and clinical links. She is author, along with Felix Guattari, of the book Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo published in Spanish. | | | - | | Registration | |
Admission requirements: Applicants must have a university degree or equivalent and must have a good level of both Spanish and English. The classes are given in Spanish and English depending on the professor and the subject matter.
Applying: Applicants to the Program must provide the following information:
• Application form
• Personal statement (two pages)
• Curriculum vitae
• Two letters of recommendation
• A certified photocopy of the university degree
• A photocopy of the national ID card or passport
• Two passport-sized photographs
The selection process is based on the material provided and a personal interview. Above all, the relationship between the Program’s content and objectives and the applicant’s experience and current activities, whether academic or professional, will be valued. The applicant’s level of English will also be verified.
Applications are only accepted via regular mail:
Programa de Estudios Independientes - MACBA
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
08001 Barcelona, España
Academic Recognition: The Independent Studies Program (PEI) is recognized as a Master’s degree by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) within the program in Museum Studies and Critical Theory.
Available places: Minimum of 20 and maximum of 40 participants. The MACBA reserves the right to cancel the course should the number of successful applicants not reach the minimum.
Enrollment: The cost of enrollment is 3,000 eur.
Payment policy: 60% in December 2009 and 40% in January 2011.
Scholarships: The Independent Studies Program offers a number of partial and full scholarships.
For further information on other means of funding, please contact the MACBA’s Academic Programs Coordinator at (+34) 93 481 79 00 or pei@macba.cat.
Admission and enrollment:
Deadline for the reception of applications: 2 October 2009
Formal registration and payment: 15 December 2009 |
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