CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts

Year 1. Illegibility

Mirtha Dermisache, Lectura Pública 7 (Public Reading 7), 2006. Museo Reina Sofía. Long-term loan from the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation, 2020 (Donation by Juan Alejandro Larumbe and Leonor Cantarelli, Mirtha Dermisache Legacy)

Mirtha Dermisache, Lectura Pública 7 (Public Reading 7), 2006
 

Museo Reina Sofía

Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.

The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.

What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.

The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world? 

Read more

Managed and supported by

Erea Fernández and Arantxa Romero

Coordinated by

Ana Vidal González and Lola Visglerio Gómez

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía and ARTEA

Organised by

ARTEA

EXPERIMENTA. Project PID2023-148236NB-C21. Financed by Spain’s State Research Agency (AEI-MICIU) 10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, EU

Agencia Estatal de Investigación

Clinic, Year 1. Illegibility
A Call for Writings

The first edition of Clinic 2628 is predicated on the idea of illegibility, understood as artistic languages’ resistance to being absorbed by meanings and resulting in an affirmation of forms. Forms which, in not referring to a univocal and immediately legible message, initiate a process to produce meaning which creatively compromises the entire sphere involved in the aesthetic experience.

This way of understanding illegibility is underpinned in, on the one hand, avant-garde practices and intermedia and conceptual approaches which adopt writing because of its graphic performativity (Mallarmé, Ferrari, Hatherly, Broodthaers, Michaux, Ullán). On the other hand, it is anchored in the theoretical tradition of deviation, placing in dialogue formalist (Shklovsky), structuralist (Jakobson and Lotman) and post-structuralist (Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva and Wittig) proposals to produce, historically from the 1970s onwards, a conceptual network in which notions of difference, supplementing, sliding, jouissance and dissidence point to a close relationship between aesthetics and ontology whenever art is conceived as a channel not solely of access and comprehension, but also of the production and transformation of reality.

This network of thought reaches contemporaneity to consider the role of art and writing in terms of the current colonial-extractivist phase of capitalism. Accordingly, operating within are notions such as “necro-writing” (Cristina Rivera Garza), “wrap” and “syncope” (Isabel de Naverán), the “analyrical” (María Salgado) and “difficulty” (Erea Fernández). In the same vein, and believing in the possibility of blurring art practice and theory, of interest here are the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hélène Cixous, Fred Moten, Lyn Hejinian and Cecilia Vicuña, among others.

Therefore, the Clinic is shaped, from these coordinates and desires, as a work space structured around three strands:

  1. Individual follow-up sessions: a remote session every two months to support each process of research and writing.
  2. Encounters of collective creation and process sharing: three in-person group sessions throughout the course (in February, May and October, in the afternoon) year held in the Museo’s Study Centre, and practices of thought and text production. The exact dates of the in-person sessions will be chosen within those months based on the availability of the members of the community.
  3. A guest-led annual workshop: in relation to a problem area convened in each edition.

Each course ends with processes of collective writing being opened to the public, while the supported writing realised over the three editions will be published in one volume at the end. Given that the aim is to create a small community and close-knit and measured dynamics, participants must commit to attending the encounters and refrain from releasing their own project before the publication.

Different working strands are put forward below to serve as guidance for applications. However, they do not constitute an exhaustive list of problem areas for participants: 

  • The aesthetic and political implications of illegibility in literature and art.
  • Deviation, difficulty, opacity. Research from experimental practice.
  • Artistic practices between writing and drawing: gestures, cryptography, imagined alphabets, graphology and corrections.
  • Critical revisions of the post-structuralist legacy in the arts.
  • Experimentation with the materiality of thought and visible-sound-legible tensions.

For any further questions, please write to clínicax2628x@gmail.com or centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es.

NewsletterSubscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with the activities organised by the Museo

Más actividades