About

Julia Ramírez-Blanco is senior researcher (Ramón y Cajal contract) at Madrid´s Complutense University. Her interdisciplinary work connects art history, utopian studies, and activist movements. She has conducted research on the political iconography of social movements, with a focus on the British direct-action environmentalism of the 1990s and the Spanish 15M movement that occupied city squares with activist camps in 2011. She has also written on the relationships between contemporary art and utopia, and on the gendered history of artistic collectives.

Her research frames utopia as the backbone of politics, which condenses its vision in an idealized whole. Her work understands performative, symbolic, and visual elements as a privileged space in which the utopian discourse is developed. She has published internationally and is the sole author of three monographs – Artistic Utopias of Revolt (Palgrave, 2018), 15M. El tiempo de las plazas (Alianza, 2021), and Amigos, disfraces y comunas (Cátedra, forthcoming, 2022) – and editor of two books and a journal issue. She has authored articles and chapters in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. As well as conducting research stays in New York, Nantes, Amiens, and Princeton, she is a committee member of the Utopian Studies Society and belongs to the Intentional Communities Research Group. She now co-leads the work and research group Aesthetics & Technics (Civic Media Lab, American University Paris), and collaborates with the C4AA. She also has co-led the research and exhibition project Grande Révolution Domèstique-Guise on feminist utopias. She has amply collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and has curated the of the 15M materials for the recent reorganization of the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. At present, she is working on a book on back-to-the-land communities as part of a broader project on the transversal history of artistic collectives and ecological utopias in the face of the climate crisis.