UP/ROOTING. School of Common Knowledge 2025  

Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11 to 16 in Madrid and Barcelona.  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 of Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.   

To participate, please submit a short motivation letter (500 words max.), together with your biography and contact details by June 27. Applications must be sent as one PDF file to this email: sck@macba.cat. Successful applicants will be informed by July 9. 

A contribution of 300 EUR per participant will cover the travel from Madrid to Barcelona during the program and most of the meals. Inbound travel to Madrid and return travel from Barcelona, as well as the accommodation in both cities, will need to be covered by applicants themselves.  Visit internationaleonline.org for more information.  _{Image: School of Common Knowledge on its first edition at Zagreb and Ljubljana, 2024. Photo: Vanja Babic}