Where Are the Oases? PEI Obert International Seminar

Untitled “Where Are the Oases?”, the ninth edition of the PEI (Independent Studies Program. March 2023–June 2024) explores the notion of the “oasis” as a space for ideological resistance and the generation of shared knowledges. The program has a porous format that intermittently opens up to audiences near and far, and to specific local communities, inviting actors and agents of the immediate context to take part in the building of an expanded learning community. The PEI Obert or open seminar, follows the inaugural open lecture of Elvira Espejo Acay, on the mutual nurturing of the arts, as a new way of perceiving life and also add value to knowledge that, transmitted from generation to generation, constitutes a wealth of wisdom as well as a means of anti-colonial resistance. The seminar “Where Are the Oases?”, which will be held on April 12, 13 and 14 will feature the participation of Emily Jacir, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Françoise Vergès and the directors of the programme: Kader Attia, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz.

What day-to-day scenarios are configured as spaces for the emancipation of individuals and communities? We are experiencing a process of environmental, sociopolitical, cultural and economic desertification. Neoliberal capitalism and its logic of accumulation, based on the maximum possible exploitation of natural and human resources monetizes all life to feed into the necropolitical order. Environmental collapse, the far-reaching public health crisis, the dissemination of hate culture and the permanent state of war that define the geopolitics of the present, threaten what remains of the promise of an inhabitable world.

Faced with these issues and taking them as the starting point for the present edition of PEI, the seminar aims to explore diverse configurations of emancipatory space-times, intersections of decolonial practice and thought. Spaces of critical resistance in the field of art and beyond, collective agencies that constitute true oases for knowledge sharing, methodologies and political tools for the worlds we inhabit. A diversity of life stories and experiences that, together with other forms of knowledge are at work to create space-times of hospitality.

Unfolding these oases will also involve questioning the nature of the spaces we want to identify as ours, as well as what the times of the commons are, where and how we want to generate resistance and how we can live together, as if the society we envision is already a reality.

April 12, 13 and 14, 2023. Meier Auditorium (MACBA). Free admission with prior reservation. Sessions will be in English, French and Spanish with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

PEI Oberts are open seminars held every three months. This is an in-person programme, but you can also follow it live via our website and YouTube channel.