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?
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
EXPERIMENTA. Project PID2023-148236NB-C21. Financed by Spain’s State Research Agency (AEI-MICIU) 10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, EU
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:
- Individual follow-up sessions: a remote session every two months to support each process of research and writing.
- 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.
- 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.
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.