9th edition of Independent Studies Programme (PEI)

The MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona is pleased to announce the ninth edition of the Independent Studies Programme (PEI), starting in March 2023 and running for four terms until June 2024. Applications for admission will be accepted between September 26 and October 14, 2022.

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.

Since its foundation in 2006, the Independent Studies Programme (PEI) has acted as a tool for learning and institutional critique, offering a platform that encourages the production of critical and collective thought, based on the interrelation between artistic practices, social sciences and political intervention.

The PEI is positioned as an interdependent programme committed to the temporal and sociopolitical realities and contexts that surround it. Over 16 years, more than 250 students from 30 different countries have participated, building bridges and weaving networks between communities of artists, local initiatives and international activists. In this sense, the PEI understands artistic research and political activism as related methodologies in which different forms of knowledge and systems of representation and social codification converge. More than a history of art, the PEI offers a history of institutions, understood as a history of the human, the social and the political that we collectively institute.

Where Are the Oases?
Asking Where Are the Oases? means recognising that we are experiencing a process of climate, social and political desertification. We live in an environment that incessantly develops characteristics adverse to life. Neoliberal capitalism and its logic of accumulation through the maximum possible exploitation of natural and human resources is a system that manages death in order to monetise life. The collapse of the environment, the profound public health crisis, the culture of hate and the permanent state of war that define the geopolitics of the present threaten what remains of the promise of a free world and a good life.

Where Are the Oases? means looking for spaces and processes that can resist this process of desertification and drainage of life. It means asking ourselves a series of questions: Where and how do we want to resist? What are the spaces we want to identify as ours? What are the times of the commons? How can we live together as if the society we want already existed?

The ninth edition of the PEI, Where Are the Oases?, is based on an exercise of appreciation and critical review of previous editions and formats, and uses this reflection to articulate a conceptual proposal that ensures continuity while also updating it.

For detailed information about the programme and the application process, please visit our website or contact the Academic Secretariat: pei [​at​] macba.cat.