In a present shaken by multiple crises — social, political, economic, ecological — critical thinking becomes an essential tool not only for understanding the world but also for transforming it. Certainties are crumbling, traditional political languages seem exhausted, and conventional education systems, often anchored in the reproduction of normative knowledge, prove insufficient to imagine alternatives. In this context, it becomes urgent to rethink what it means to learn, with whom, from where, and for what purpose.

The Independent Studies Program (PEI for the Catalan and Spanish acronyms) at MACBA was created in 2006 in response to this need. Far from replicating the traditional academic model, the PEI offers a situated, collective, and critical learning space where artistic practices, social theories, dissident memories, and horizons of struggle intersect. Over nearly two decades, the PEI has become a laboratory for rehearsing other ways of thinking and being in the world, bringing together students, educators, and cultural agents who refuse the established boundaries between art, politics, and education.

Solidarity as Situated Practice

The tenth edition of the PEI, which will run from September 2025 to July 2026, is titled “Sol y dar y dad. Collective Learning for an Inadmissible Present”, a poetic evocation of the work of Cecilia Vicuña that invokes the political and poetic power of solidarity. In the face of increasingly rigid borders (as addressed in our May editorial, Living on the Border), the criminalization of mutual care, and the instrumentalization of culture, this new edition poses a radical question: How can we think and practice solidarity in times marked by isolation, repression, and widespread disaffection?

The 2025–2026 edition is structured around three research cores: Pan-Africanisms, led by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Tania Safura Adam (Archivos Negros), and Ingrid Blanco, which approaches Pan-Africanisms as anti- and postcolonial movements of articulation beyond racialization; Embodied Solidarities, coordinated by Nancy Garín (Equipo re, Cosmografías), with special attention to the networks of care that emerged during the HIV/AIDS pandemic; and Counterinformation, with Erick Beltrán–Lumbung Press, which revisits historical strategies such as militant press, free radio, and agitprop cinema as current tools of cultural resistance.

This edition of the PEI will be directed by María Berríos, whose trajectory combines curatorial work with a commitment to critical and contextual pedagogy, and who is currently Head of Conservation and Research at MACBA. Berríos will lead a core seminar titled “Artistic Solidarities and Internationalism.”

All research areas will be enriched by the contributions of various artists, educators, theorists, and collectives, including: Cecilia Vicuña, Chimurenga–Ntone Edjabe, Diego Falconi, Equipo re (Aimar Arriola, Linda Valdés, and Nancy Garín), Grupo Etcétera, Javier García Fernández, Learning Palestine Group, Marwa Arsanios, Pip Day, Radio Alhara, and the Tricontinental Institute – Vijay Prashad.

Thinking While Teaching, Teaching While Thinking

One of the PEI’s most significant contributions has been the redefinition of the intellectual figure. No longer the expert who speaks from above, nor the academic confined to an ivory tower. The PEI proposes another figure: the thinker-educator-intellectual — someone who engages with knowledge through experience, listening, and contradiction. Rather than delivering closed-off knowledge, this figure — who might be an artist, activist, curator, or researcher — poses questions, enables processes, and creates the conditions for collective thought.

In this sense, the PEI aligns with a critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Stuart Hall, conceiving education as a practice of freedom, not domestication. The classroom becomes a political space, where forms of life, reading, symbolic production, and concrete intervention are experimented with. At the PEI, teaching is always a relational act, and learning also means disarming oneself, becoming uncomfortable, allowing oneself to be affected.

Learning in Common, Imagining the Impossible

In times when cynicism and individual retreat seem to dominate responses to malaise, the PEI at MACBA persists as a space from which it is possible to imagine other ways of inhabiting the present. Far from offering prefabricated solutions, its proposal lies in opening questions, activating memory, generating bonds, and holding tensions. Learning not as the accumulation of knowledge, but as a situated practice of transformation.

The commitment to a critical, collective, and transdisciplinary pedagogy not only challenges the ways knowledge is produced but also how we coexist. In this sense, the PEI is not simply an educational program: it is a tool to resist fragmentation, a space for rehearsing improbable alliances, and a site where political imagination is affirmed as a fundamental part of thinking.

Taken as a whole, this tenth edition of the PEI does not merely offer a conceptual framework; it seeks to generate a living space for mutual learning and the rehearsal of new ways of being and acting together. In a present where solidarity becomes a subversive act, the PEI can reaffirm its role as an experimental laboratory for transformative thought and action.

Previous editions of the PEI, 2021-22

Previous editions of the PEI

Dates: from September 2025 to July 2026, with seminars and research groups programmed periodically.
Venue: MACBA, Barcelona (with some activities hosted by collaborating institutions).
New registration deadline: 12 June 2025.
Requirements: short letter of motivation + short CV
For more information about the 10th edition of PEI and details for application, press here.

[Featured Imagen: Cecilia Vicuña. Sol y Dar y Dad, 1974/2023. MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium © Cecilia Vicuña]