From 12 November to 18 December 2025, the ARENAS exhibition ‘Going Extreme: How Extremist Narratives Are Destroying Democracies’ was on display at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The exhibition has been a resounding success
Commissioned by Steven Forti, professor of Contemporary History at the UAB and leader of ARENAS Work Package 3, the exhibition was developed in collaboration with ARENAS researchers Sergi Soler and Nathalie Paris and a group of eight students from the UAB’s Contemporary History, Politics and Economics bachelor degree programme.
The official opening of the exhibition, was attended by academic authorities from the UAB, including the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Margarita Freixas, and the Vice-Dean, Nicola Di Nino. Since then it has been visited by 1,700 people, mainly students, researchers and lecturers from the UAB. This included four one-hour guided tours given to 182 students from different bachelor degree programmes at the UAB.
Two lectures with guest speakers were also organised in connection with the exhibition. On 20 November, sociolinguist and discourse analyst Laura Camargo (University of the Balearic Islands) gave a lecture entitled ‘From rejection to appropriation: cross-gender strategies in the Spanish far right’. On 4 December, political scientist Balša Lubarda (John Hopkins University – University Pompeu Fabra Public Policy Centre) gave a lecture entitled ‘Ecologies of the right: ideology, policy and exclusion over the years. Both lectures were attended by around 70 people.
Throughout 2026, the exhibition will be shown at other ARENAS partner universities. The next stop will be the Université Cergy-Paris, France, where ‘Going Extreme: How Extremist Narratives Are Destroying Democracies’ will be on display between March and April.
In the coming months, the exhibition will also be translated into Spanish thanks to the collaboration of the programme ‘España en libertad. 50 años’ (Spain in Freedom. 50 Years) of the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory of the Government of Spain, and into Catalan thanks to the collaboration of the Memorial Democràtic of Generalitat de Catalunya. So, throughout 2026, the ARENAS exhibition will also tour different regions of Spain and can be visited by thousands of people.