Related Imaginaries of Revolt, Archive of Life, and Experience Reshaped from the Pandemic

Curated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair articulates different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. This programme of analysis and reflection — put together at the crossroads between the aesthetic, the theoretical, the critical and the political — conceives of memory as an agent with which to decipher and re-read incomplete narratives, the fragments and scenes of which continue to question the present.

By way of documentaries and essay films, this series sets forth different ways of approaching memory to explore the different zones of conflict between subjectivity and politics; between militancy and revolutions; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between memory and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent the present.

To conclude this new edition of the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory Chair, Judith Butler gives a lecture on the idea of memory outside hegemonic readings of history, drawing from mottos/slogans, poems, posters, excerpts from texts, and materials that look to concisely transmit something lost from the past.