Talk Series | Sara Nadal-Melsió

Sara Nadal-Melsió is a Catalan writer, curator, and educator committed to collaborative thinking, alternative literacies, and collective learning practices.
Europe and the Wolf explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions.
Throughout, Europe is understood as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The talk follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.
Sara Nadal-Melsió has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, New York University, SOMA in Mexico City, and The Birkbeck Humanities Institute for the Humanities, and continues to teach at EinaIdea in Barcelona. She has also been the Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogues. Most recently, she is the co-author (with Eduardo Cadava) of Politically Red (MIT, 2023) and the author of Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure( Zone Books, 2025).