Skip to main content

Biennial of Thought

The Biennial of Thought was launched in 2018 with a view to debating the role of cities in the great challenges facing contemporary society. It emerged with the aim of becoming a celebration of the city as a forum in which to discuss the cities that we want and that we need, with plural views and the participation of everyone.

Siegfried Zielinski and Anthony Moore

Performative lecture, “Dancing Philosophy”

Pioneers of what is known as the expanded lecture, composer and experimental musician Anthony Moore and media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski offer an alternative view of European philosophy i which thought takes the forms of sound, rhythm, melody, and image.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and Núria Bendicho Giró

5,600 trees to safeguard language

In this conversation with the writer Núria Bendicho Giró, Icelandic author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir discusses the relationship between the collapse of the planet and extinction of minority languages when exploring the links between environment, language, and identity.

Eliane Brum and Gabi Martínez

The Amazon, centre of the world

The Amazon is not only the world’s largest tropical forest, but it is also a symbol of a radical transformation of ways of thinking about and inhabiting the world. In this conversation with the writer Gabi Martínez, the journalist and climate activist Eliane Brum argues that the ...

Gueorgui Gospodínov and Miquel Cabal

Control over the past, control over the future

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, Gueorgui Gospodínov warns of the dangers of nostalgia and exalting a supposed glorious past. In a conversation with translator Miquel Cabal, Gospodínov suggests looking reality straight in the eye to see a place where authoritarianism ...

Corine Pelluchon and Marta Segarra

Preserving life—a new Enlightenment for a shared planet

With the threat of a possible eco-social collapse, trust in progress rooted in Enlightenment thought seems to be contrary to the mood of modern times. Corine Pelluchon and Marta Segarra invite us to revisit the legacy of the Enlightenment, rethink it critically, and build a new humanism.

Africa: Decolonizing Knowledge

A morning with Oyèrónké Oyewùmí

Sociologist Oyèrónké Oyewùmí highlights the need to deuniversalize the way we understand the world and the role of Africa as a producer of knowledge. The session has a pedagogical dossier (in Catalan) so that the students can work on the contents ...

Dagmawi Woubshet and Ada Klein Fortuny

Verses for collective mourning

Amid experiences and verses, the researcher Dagmawi Woubshet questions with writer Ada Klein Fortuny illnesses which, beyond pain, carry stigma, silence, and a lack of social understanding, and together they ponder the invisible ties that unite community and grief. Martí Sales, writer, ...

Audrey Diwan and Carla Simón

Successors of Varda

In this conversation moderated by film critic Mariona Borrull, filmmakers Audrey Diwan and Carla Simón defend the audacity, boldness, and tenacity of the Varda spirit as compasses that have guided their cinematic exploration. 

The wild sounds of Catalonia. Natural parks and sound ecology

Wild Rumours and Sound Art. Seminar on the installation “Bestiari”

Biologists, natural scientists, and activists exchange knowledge about the current conditions of fauna in Catalonia’s Natural Parks and discuss how sound recordings can be a way to create closer ties with natural diversity. 

The Seduction of Lies

A morning with Zadie Smith

Writer Zadie Smith talks about the weight of imposture and the effects of false beliefs in our society after the publication of her book The Fraud (2023). The session has a pedagogical dossier (in Catalan) so that the students can work on the contents beforehand ...

Africa and the Afrodiaspora Faced with Gender Worlds

Seminar with Oyèrónké Oyewùmí

In this project of revising gender theories, Professor Oyèrónké Oyewùmí considers the theses presented in her book The Invention of Women with this seminar led by the researcher and Doctor of Philosophy, Esther (Mayoko) Ortega.

Bestiari. Tradition, nature, technology, and sound art

Wild Rumours and Sound Art. Seminar on the installation “Bestiari”

Technology can help us create new ways of understanding nature. Specialists in the crossroads between art and science, Carlos Casas and Pol Capdevila will discuss the possibilities sound art offers to open our perception to new languages with musician, writer, curator, and sound artist David Toop.

Zadie Smith and Míriam Cano

Worn cloth and stolen truths

The acclaimed British writer Zadie Smith speaks with the translator Míriam Cano about the ways in which lies and imposture influence the functioning of society.

Clara Serra and Elena Martín

Insubordinate desire

In this conversation moderated by the journalist Anna Pazos, the philosopher Clara Serra and filmmaker Elena Martín, contrast the tensions and ambivalences of desire faced with attempts to regulate it.

Wajdi Mouawad and Oriol Broggi

Flying with wounded wings

In this session moderated by cultural journalist Laura Serra, the playwright Wajdi Mouawad and director Oriol Broggi speak about theatre as an experience of healing and emancipation in a society where violence is present every day.

Herta Müller and Cecilia Dreymüller

Freeing the word

Nobel Literature laureate Herta Müller and translator Cecilia Dreymüller speak about Europe’s present and how to place the word at the heart of things in order to keep making possible a future of freedom and peace.

Show more

Kenneth Roth

The Battle for Human Rights

There is an alarming contrast between the theoretical global consensus on the importance of human rights and the unevenness of respect for these fundamental principles. Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Humans Rights Watch, speaks with the journalist Anna Bosch about the challenges ...

Anne Waldman

"Star at Midnight", poetry recital

The poet, a living legend of American poetry and an international reference in oral poetry, performs with local artists in a single session that sets out to claim poetry as a tool for conveying ideas and for new ways of acting.

Dancing with Memory

An audiovisual performance

The artist and activist Nzé Ramón Esono Ebalé presents an artistic intervention in which he engages with personal memories and that of his birthplace, Equatorial Guinea, in order to construct his critical reflections on the colonial past and its legacy today.

Óscar Martínez, Jairo Videa and Juan Daniel Treminio

A Country without Journalists

The three investigative journalists from Central America speak about the difficulties of doing their job in situations of violence where making truths known almost always means putting one’s own life at risk.

Masha Gessen and Carolin Emcke

New Fascisms

The journalist Masha Gessen and the philosopher Carolin Emcke will speak about the need to construct new imaginaries for the future in a present context marked by the war in Ukraine and the spread of hate speech and various forms of authoritarianism.

Regarding the Pain of Others

A reading set to music

A staged and musicalized interpretation of fragments of Susan Sontag's "Regarding the pain of others", with Carlota Subirós, Clara Aguilar, and Yolanda Sey

Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth

The Mysteries of Consciousness

The doctor and researcher Antonio Damasio speaks with the neuroscientist and educator Anil Seth about the latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience, which are shedding light on the mysteries of consciousness and opening up new viewpoints from which to think what makes us humans.

Jane Mansbridge

The Art of Listening

Jane Mansbridge, a leading voice in contemporary political thought, will talk with political scientists Josep Lluís Martí and Felipe Rey Salamanca about the current challenges for Democracy and the role of listening as an instrument to guarantee their future.

Bivac. Encounter under the Elements

We are young and we feel that we are living under the elements, vulnerable navigators in an ocean of uncertainties. Five pairs of artists and thinkers, coming from diverse contexts and positions, reflect in short conversations on the present and its possible futures.

Bivac. Correspondences

Dramatic reading of an epistolary exchange between a writer and a filmmaker, accompanied by music, a dance piece and visuals.

A morning with Carolin Emcke

A right has never been won forever

Philosopher and journalist Carolin Emcke, accompanied by trans sociologist and activist Miquel Missé, reflects with the students on the collective effort to maintain an open and plural society, at a critical time when rights and freedoms that we believed were guaranteed stagger.

Andrey Kurkov and Simona Škrabec

Another Ukraine

Andrey Kurkov, writer and president of PEN Ukraine, speaks with the writer and translator Simona Škrabec about the situation in his country after the Russian invasion and all the unknowns with regard to the possibility of putting an end to the conflict.

Lucrecia Martel i Carla Simón

Stop to Observe, Love the World

Filmmakers and screenwriters Lucrecia Martel and Carla Simón talk with film critic Violeta Kovacsics about how cinema creates new ways of seeing and new spaces of encounter.

Show more

Yuval Noah Harari and Rutger Bregman

Shared Futures

 In the current context, when we are far from having put an end to violence and inequalities on the planet, thinking about the future has surely become the challenge that requires maximum audacity. The historians Yuval Noah Harari and Rutger Bregman speak about the challenges of the present ...

Svetlana Alexievich

The Voices of Europe

Svetlana Alexievich speaks about the future we can imagine for Europe from a perspective forged in the east of the continent and permeated by the polyphonic chorus of witnesses who have populated her long career as a journalist and writer.

A morning with Marina Garcés

The time of promises

In this exercise in collective imagination the philosopher Marina Garcés invites young people in our city to delete the questions of fear and make the future a time for promises. 

A hint of light

The end of the Biennale programme coincides with the conclusion of Barcelona Poesia 2020. Hence, this year, we express this coincidence with a recital that invites reflection and, poetically speaking, thinks of the future through the voices of young authors from around the world, because we ...

City, Conflict and Emancipation

“Freedom or death!”, one of the most shouted slogans in the history of the West, proclaimed that life was only worth living if something greater than life itself was recognised. The pandemic has jettisoned the ideas we had inherited about freedom and death, survival, a full life, ...

City, Conflict and Emancipation

Cities are spaces of a multiplicity of lives, stories, and worlds. The writers Marta Sanz and Cristina Morales have described in their works this structural violence incarnated by cities and have pondered the possibilities of emancipation beyond the limits imposed by the norm. The writer and ...

Zoomer Culture

In the last decade, the expansion of Internet-based technologies has led to the emergence of new languages which, thanks to their interconnectivity and the reach of social networks, have overturned the cultural paradigm. What cultural phenomena interest the new generations and how have they been affected by the pandemic and the lockdown? The youtuber and philosopher Ernesto Castro moderates this discussion with the journalist and writer Anna Pacheco, who will analyse popular culture from the perspective of gender and class; the philosopher and transactivist Elizabeth Duval, who has written about the power of the media on the basis of her experience as a public figure; and the journalist Claudia Rius, who has focused on emerging cultural manifestations within the Catalan cultural ecosystem. ...

5 Futures

Five people from very different backgrounds and of a wide range of profiles present the futures they imagine. Five voices, five stories. The essayist Peter Frase talks about capitalism and technology, while the philosopher Laura Llevadot focuses on the domain of political thought. The environmentalist ...

Looking to the Future

The experience of the last few months, in a world ravaged by the pandemic, is an occasion for looking ahead in a different way and putting into words a future collective that retreats from dystopias and makes of this unlooked-for present a fount of new opportunities.  n this session, ...

Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret

Phonocene

Biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway dialogues with the philosopher Vinciane Despret after the performative reading “Phonocene”. This dialogue, according to Haraway, is not about “us”, it’s about the world, about all the non-human voices that we had ceased to ...

Enric Casasses

Poetic Manifesto for the Future

Accompanied by the music of Ilia Mayer, poet Enric Casasses, winner of the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, reflects on the concept of freedom, putting to it words paradoxically found during lockdown.

The Planet's Voices

Swamped in this anthropocentric gaze, we have lost our connections with our surroundings and have forgotten that neither our history nor our future can be written without the other inhabitants of Earth. In this session, the philosopher Vinciane Despret presents her reading-cum-performance ...

Maria Arnal, María Sánchez and Irene Solà

The Voices of the Planet

We might say that understanding the world consists in living immersed in stories. Singer Maria Arnal puts music to the words of the philosopher Donna Haraway, and is joined by the writers María Sánchez and Irene Solà, the three weaving a tale of fish and nature, of drought ...

Margaret Atwood

Looking at the future

Margaret Atwood talks to cultural journalist Anna Guitart. The writer, famous for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale, talks about the future of human beings on a planet under threat, while reviewing her biography and her literary career.