From 17 to 20 August, Rototom Sunsplash’s Social Forum brought four conversations that might have seemed unrelated to Benicàssim’s Teatre Municipal. Music and mental health, housing, ecological crisis and geopolitics.

Taken together, they asked a shared question. What conditions do we need to live with other people, care for the commons and retain the capacity to act in societies shaped by technological, economic, environmental and political change?

The 2026 edition was organised by Fundación Exodus with Rototom Sunsplash and Benicàssim Town Council. It brought together Álvaro Pascual-Leone, Betty Roca Hubbauer, María Prado, Isabel Vergara, Elga Molina, Vandana Shiva, Francisco Vera, Rokhaya Diallo and Juan Bordera, among others. The official Social Forum archive brings together the four 2026 sessions.

A brain that does not end at the head

The first session, ‘Culture, music and wellbeing — tools for building hope’, brought together neuroscience, community psychology and musical creation.

Álvaro Pascual-Leone began from a simple premise. Our brains continually change through what we do, think and experience. Plasticity is not something switched on only on special occasions but a permanent condition. Music is especially interesting because it works through rhythm, expectation, repetition, surprise and synchronisation.

The discussion quickly moved from the individual brain to relationships.

For Pascual-Leone, connection with other people is essential to understanding the human brain. Music, dance and physical presence can synchronise experience and help create that connection.

Betty Roca Hubbauer brought in another scale from her work at Psicólogas sin Fronteras. A disaster never affects everyone from the same starting point. Existing material conditions, insecurity, migration and violations of rights also shape the prospects for recovery.

The exchange exposed one of the day’s most useful tensions. Pascual-Leone stressed the value of reconnecting a person with a group. Roca reminded the audience that this cannot easily be separated from the basics of sleep, food and safety.

Culture therefore appeared not as something that arrives after essential needs have been met, but as one of the means through which bonds are rebuilt. The full first session is available from Rototom.

Then artificial intelligence entered the conversation

During that discussion, Sergi Pitarch asked a question that places this edition of the Forum directly within AIthropology Lab’s field of attention.

He began with the mobile phone and with cognitive capacities we have progressively delegated to external devices. We no longer need to remember certain telephone numbers, routes or pieces of information because a tool does it for us.

What happens now with artificial intelligence?

Pitarch asked whether delegating an increasing share of intellectual work to these systems might affect the future, health or wellbeing of our brains.

Pascual-Leone avoided both automatic technological enthusiasm and outright rejection. He described AI as a powerful tool. Its importance, he argued, depends on what we do with it. A tool can greatly expand our possibilities, but it can also become a substitute for activities we need to practise ourselves.

His example matters. If AI becomes a generator of art and empathy, we risk ceasing to exercise those capacities ourselves, quite apart from its limitations in carrying out either task. Used differently, it can become extraordinarily valuable.

Pascual-Leone then added a second point of particular interest for an anthropology of technology. The tools we use alter our brains.

He illustrated it with examples older than AI. A cane becomes part of a blind person’s bodily representation. A professional driver takes the dimensions of a vehicle into their way of moving through space. Technologies do not remain wholly outside the people who use them.

Applied to artificial intelligence, the question changes.

It is no longer enough to ask.

What can AI do for us?

We also need to ask.

Which capacities do we stop practising when we delegate them, and what kinds of people are we training ourselves to become through these tools?

This is where the Social Forum enters AIthropology Lab’s territory most clearly.

A home is also a network of relationships

On 18 August, ‘A place to live — housing as a right’ moved the discussion from the body to one of the most basic infrastructures of everyday life.

María Prado, Greenpeace’s housing campaign lead, Isabel Vergara of Oxfam Intermón and Elga Molina, Director General for Housing in the Government of Navarre, discussed rent, protected housing, renovation, touristification and public policy. Moha Gerehou moderated the session.

Vergara set out a difficult contrast to ignore. Over the past decade, advertised rents rose by 77 per cent, while household disposable income rose by 33 per cent, according to a report by Oxfam Intermón and Spain’s Youth Council.

Another Oxfam Intermón report finds that 85 per cent of tenants spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, one in three spends more than half, and 61 per cent cannot save after paying rent.

But the discussion moved beyond economic figures.

It included the difficulty of leaving home, uncertainty, the loss of privacy and the uprooting caused by having to move repeatedly.

Participants spoke of ‘invisible evictions’. No court order is involved, but a rent increase or the end of a contract still compels someone to leave their home. Oxfam uses the same term in its 2026 documentation.

Moving can mean changing schools, leaving neighbourhood relationships, losing participation in associations and rebuilding daily life from scratch.

Seen this way, housing is not only real estate.

It is also an infrastructure of rootedness. The full housing session is available from Rototom.

Housing, climate and another measure of habitability

María Prado introduced the climate dimension.

A home does not only provide an address. In the face of extreme temperatures, fires and other phenomena associated with climate change, it is also our first shelter.

In Tu llave de la vivienda digna, Greenpeace argues that Spain needs a radical change in the scale of renovation of its existing housing stock and a roughly tenfold increase in the current pace. The report discusses a range of seven to ten million homes renovated in the coming years.

The proposal shifts the categories again.

Renovating a home can be housing policy, climate policy, energy policy and health policy at the same time.

Elga Molina offered another contrast from Navarre. The 2024 Housing Report for Navarre counts 58,656 protected dwellings on 1 January 2025, equivalent to 22.6 per cent of the main homes used as its statistical reference.

The approaches discussed — permanent protected housing, rental pools, renovation, mediation, cooperatives and collaborative housing — point towards the same question. How much of a good necessary for life should remain exposed to speculative logic?

From eco-anxiety to eco-hope

The third conversation changed scale.

In ‘Defending Pachamama — a global and collective challenge’, Vandana Shiva joined remotely from India alongside Francisco Vera, with Radio 3’s María José Parejo as moderator.

One of its central concepts was eco-hope.

Francisco Vera presented it as an alternative to eco-anxiety and the feeling of powerlessness. It does not deny the gravity of the ecological crisis or offer naïve optimism. It means turning concern, anger and indignation into collective capacity to intervene.

The question led to citizenship.

Vera challenged adultcentrism and argued that children and young people should not appear only as people to be protected by adults. They are also political subjects who can participate, make proposals, mobilise and exercise rights.

Vandana Shiva took the discussion towards another genealogy of environmental knowledge.

She recalled what she had learned from the women of India’s Chipko movement, who protected forests from logging through collective organising and physically embracing trees.

The significance of that history is not limited to activism.

It also shifts the question of who produces valid knowledge.

Universities produce knowledge. Institutional science does too. But people who live with a forest across generations, know its plants, read its soil, conserve seeds and observe the water cycle also produce knowledge about that territory.

The conversation connected those experiences with food sovereignty, ecocide, migration, exile, the economy and violence against people defending territories and ecosystems. The full Pachamama session is available from Rototom.

The day’s own closing summary also warned of the digitalisation of the world and of a growing distance from the terrestrial order. It did not, however, include an AI discussion comparable to that of the first day.

After the Earth, war

The fourth and final session, held on 20 August, took the Forum into geopolitics.

‘The law of the strongest — empires, wars and resistance’ brought Rokhaya Diallo and Juan Bordera together to discuss international conflicts, the erosion of international law, authoritarianism and civil society’s capacity to act. Rototom’s official archive confirms the session and its participants.

We do not attribute specific arguments to Diallo or Bordera here because we have not worked from a complete transcript of that session.

Its place in the programme is nonetheless significant.

The Forum began by asking about the relationship between brain, music and community.

It ended by asking what happens when the rules intended to organise coexistence between societies give way to force.

Between those poles it had spoken of homes and the Earth.

Four conversations, one question

Heard consecutively, the sessions allow a connection that the Forum did not state explicitly in these terms.

Brains need relationships.

Relationships need places in which they can be made.

Those places need habitable territories.

And those territories need institutions able to limit force and power.

Artificial intelligence appears in that sequence not as a separate fifth problem, but as another infrastructure beginning to intervene in our capacities, relationships and ways of acting.

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the gathering for AIthropology Lab.

AI does not arrive in an empty society.

It arrives in societies that already have rents, borders, inequalities, care networks, conflicts, local knowledge, institutions, ecosystems and different ways of imagining the future.

It changes them while those societies also change the technology.

A festival as an infrastructure for conversation

All this took place inside a music festival.

For four afternoons, Rototom worked as a temporary public square. People initially gathered around musical culture could meet to discuss neuroplasticity, artificial intelligence, housing, food sovereignty, childhood, migration and international law.

Fundación Exodus defines the Forum as a space for critical thought, dialogue and collective reflection beyond the concert grounds.

Radio 3 extended that conversation beyond the theatre. Its special coverage announced daily interviews with Social Forum participants and spoke with Betty Roca Hubbauer on the first day.

There is something anthropologically revealing about the format.

An increasing part of public conversation now takes place through digital platforms and recommendation algorithms.

Here the opposite occurred. People met physically and spent more than an hour listening to arguments, disagreements and questions before responding.

After hearing Pascual-Leone speak about AI, brain plasticity and the need to sustain real human relationships, this form of gathering is no longer simply the setting for the conversation.

It is also part of what the conversation is saying.

Sources and materials

Social Forum and primary audiovisual material

Radio 3

Housing and renovation

Note on transcripts

For this Radar, the three original videos published by Rototom are the primary sources. Three working transcripts were generated automatically from those videos and used only as supporting material. They may contain errors, especially in proper names and Vandana Shiva’s contribution in English. Any direct quotation should be checked against the original audio.