CITAR explores artistic practice from a triple perspective: research, creation, and conservation. Its main fields of expertise are cinema, visual arts, sound art, new media art, heritage and conservation-restoration. It has a post-disciplinary approach informed by theories, technologies, and methodologies that deal with the challenges and possibilities of the future of art. Research and practice are combined through critical and creative inquiries on pressing issues such as decolonialism, empowerment of artistic minorities, community building, climate change and ecology, sustainability and societal impact, new political struggles, and the new roles of AI and emergent digital and virtual technologies, among others. 

CITAR is distributed in three focus areas: Cinema and Visual Arts (CVA), Sound and New Media Art (SNMA), and Heritage, Conservation and Restoration (HCR). This structure contextualises our around 140 members fostering dialogue and joint efforts between senior and junior researchers in the domains of artistic and scientific research.

Our 2025-2029 Activity Plan reinforces the work carried out between 2018 and 2023 and CITAR’s goal to explore artistic phenomena as a way of understanding and experiencing the world: its practice and creativity, its cultural and political complexity, its engagement with emergent technologies, its sustainability. Our researchers have developed high-quality events, artworks, curatorial practices, publications, and projects to further advance knowledge and to create spaces of critical discussion and disruption within artistic research.

For the next five-year period, CITAR proposes an ambitious project to further explore the concept of artistic research as a central point for our future inquiries. This project is consolidated by addressing 4 guiding principles:

• Artistic practices – research, creation, and conservation. Understanding artistic practices as research processes and as knowledge production tools, from the perspectives of creativity, critical inquiries to artworks’ modes of production, and their conservation-restoration.
• Method and technology of artistic practices and conservation. Exploring how technology intersects with art and science, involving emergent tools such as AI, human-machine co-creation, immersive and augmented environments, digital documentation, and materiality.
• Curatorial research as a critical practice: linking artistic practice and critical thinking through theories and activities that frame them with technology, society, culture, politics, and audiences.
• Sustainability and impact of artistic objects and processes. Addressing the impacts of art in terms of its audiences, education, sustainability, cultural mediation, as well as processes for greener conservation and integration in societal challenges such as climate change or social inclusion.

Please check our detailed Strategic Plan (2025-2029), as well as our list of researchers.