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
Economy of Hate
18 ABR, 9 MAY 2026
Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
![Dias & Riedweg, Casulo [Crisálida], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/desafios-cine-2.png.webp)
Other Voices in Us All
17 ABR, 8 MAY 2026
A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.
We Go On from Here… And Will Not Move
Thursday, 16 April and Thursday, 7 May 2026 — 19:00
This session advances a programme focused on the most elemental side of performance: a simple, direct act that starts from the self-exhibition of the body. At certain points, from the calculated serenity of Miguel Benlloch’s Tengo tiempo (I Have Time, 1994); at other times, from the challenging and visceral impulse of Bollos (Buns, 1996), by Cabello y Carceller, or the rage of Habla (Talk, 2008), by Cristina Lucas; and, finally, from video-graphic experimentation, disconcerting and sustained in the dance culture of Moving Backwards (2019), by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose mise en scène reminds us that it is not actually déjà vu but the present, unfortunately, that moves through a reactionary period.
Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas
Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April, 2026 – Check Programme
READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.
In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.
The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.
Juan Uslé and the New York Experience
15 ABR 2026
Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.
The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.
Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.