"On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination",
directed by Ishy Pryce-Parchment,
organised by Museo Reina Sofía.

The seminar proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.

Free entry until full capacity is reached, prior registration via form until March 31st, 2026. Selected participants will be notified by April 6th, 2026.
Registration: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/activity/black-poethics/registration

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Agenda

Monday 27 apr 2026 - 16:00
Contamination, Lysis, Autopsy, Metamorphosis
The first session will introduce participants to the framework, a “black poethics of contamination”, grounded in the selected works of Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter. Through a harvest of readings, annotations, and dialogues, we will probe the constitutive terms of this Wynterian-Fanonian framework: "Autopsy," "lysis," "contamination," and "metamorphosis," through which to explore how Black Study moves us closer to unsettling the structure of Western knowledge, and sensitises us towards a new, inclusive definition of humanism.

Tuesday 28 apr 2026 -16:00
Black Methods
This session will gather a range of multimodal and interdisciplinary texts, ideas, and methodologies utilised by black thinkers, artists, scholars and creatives that challenge the hierarchical organising of knowledge and artistic research processes. In a sequence of collaborative exercises, we will test and experiment with the «anindex», the footnote, citational practices, and the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, annotation and redaction as ways to story our work otherwise.

Wednesday 29 apr 2026 - 16:00
Decolonial Aesthesis
The final session will respond to Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez’ call to wrest aesthesis (sensory perception) from its colonisation under the racial-colonial regime of modern aesthetics. Encountering artworks, poetry, music, exhibition texts, and performance works, we will engage a range of sensorial reading strategies that reveal how black aesthesis/aesthetics provide a meaningful pathway to transforming our structures of feeling and perception.