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 various monographs – Artistic Utopias of Revolt (Palgrave, 2018), 15M. El tiempo de las plazas (Alianza, 2021), and Amigos, disfraces y comunas (Cátedra, 2022), La ciudad del Sol, Le mouvement 15M entre formes et performances (Éditions Lorelei, 2023), – and editor of various books journal issues. 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.

Together with Lise Lérichomme and Sally Bonn, Ramírez-Blanco co-led the research project and exhibition Grande Révolution Domèstique-Guise on feminist utopias, which took place in the Familistère of Guise. She has been Committee member of the Utopian Studies Society and belongs to the Center for Artistic Activism’s Research Collab. 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. In Reina Sofía, she is part of the core group of Tejidos Conjuntivos The Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies.

Currently, she is working on ecological utopias in the face of the climate crisis.