Courses

“In/disciplines of the Quotidian: Spanish Still Lives and the Politics of the Overlooked” is an interdisciplinary cultural studies course that investigates how the ordinary becomes a site of tension, meaning, and critique across Spanish artistic traditions. Taking as its point of departure two productive contradictions—the paradox of still life/ Naturaleza muerta (simultaneously immobile and vital) and the bodegón as both a lively social space and an emptied, object-filled scene—the course examines how the materiality of objects and backgrounds administer absence, presence and attention, reshape cultural narratives but also structure the political.

The course is grounded in a theoretical framework that treats materiality as inherently political, asking how objects participate in the organization of social life and regimes of value. Drawing on Thomas Lemke’s notion of the “government of things,” it considers how power operates not only through subjects but through arrangements of objects, infrastructures, and environments that shape conduct and perception. At the same time, it stages a dialogue between new materialist approaches—which emphasize the agency and vitality of matter—and Marxist materialisms, with their focus on labor, commodity relations, and historical conditions. Rather than opposing these traditions, the course explores their productive dialogue, showing how attention to lively matter can coexist with a critical social and political analysis ultimately reframing the overlooked object as both an active force, tool and sediment of social relations.

We will focus on very different contexts and objects of study from a comparative diachronic perspective, starting with seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish still life painting (Sánchez Cotán, Zurbarán, Meléndez, Goya) where everyday objects—food, vessels, tools—appear suspended in time yet charged with latent energy. These compositions negotiate life and stillness, abundance and austerity, the quotidian and the mystical, while also reflecting class structures, domestic labor, and consumption. The bodegón emerges here as a conceptual hinge: a trace of human interaction or monastic solitude, but also a script of its outside, and a religious and  political pedagogy.

The course then turns to avant-garde literature and film of the 1920s, where writers and film-makers fragment perception and elevate the marginal (Gómez de la Serna, García Lorca, Segundo de Chomón, Buñuel). Through experimental prose, poetry and film, the overlooked detail but also the silent threat of new technologies becomes central, and narrative attention shifts toward new and old objects, pauses, and peripheral sensations. These texts unsettle the hierarchy between subject and object, suggesting a world in which things possess their own agency and resonance exhibiting an unknown political potential.

The course will finally engage in contemporary "slow" cinema (Guerín, Serra, López Cuenca), where duration, stillness, and minimal action foreground the presence of objects and spaces over human drama. Long takes and sparse narratives create a cinematic still life, in which environments and things tend to dissolve background/foreground, subject/object oppositions.

The course ultimately argues that the overlooked—objects, silences, and "emptied" spaces—constitutes a powerful lens through which to reconsider the interrelations politics, perception, and everyday life.