Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
Study Group
Henrik Olesen, Inferno (Infierno), 2016, Museo Reina Sofía
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
Group director
Erea Fernández
Research strand director
Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Practical data
Aimed at people with an interest in research, theory, writing and contemporary art.
- Participant selection: Special consideration is given to the suitability of candidates’ trajectory and interests in relation to the study group content and to a commitment to attending all in-person sessions. Session participation entails a three-hour commitment every month, in addition to time devoted to preparation.
- Accommodation grants: Five accommodation grants are offered to those selected who live outside of Madrid. The grant covers accommodation costs for the night corresponding to each session held. To apply for this grant, candidates must provide written confirmation via the registration form, commit to attending all sessions and submit a text or work already completed, in line with the subject matter of the group. The above will be taken into consideration when awarding grants.
Sessions: 23 February, 23 March, 20 April, 18 may, 15 June, 6 July, 7 September, 5 and 26 October, and 14 December 2026; from 4pm to 7pm.
Agenda
lunes 23 feb 2026 a las 16:00
Session 1. Against Transparency. Deviation as a Radical Practice
Work readings:
- Silliman, R. (1981). Disappearance of the Word / Appearance of the World. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 3, pp. 2-12.
- Stein, G. (1998). Composition as Explanation. In C. R. Stimpson and H. Chessman (Eds.), Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932 (pp. 520-529). Library of America.
- Selection of difficult poems:
- Benson, S. (1991). Blue book. La página, encarte, pp. 104-107. (E. Pujals Gesalí, Trad). (Original work published in 1988).
- Bernstein, C. (1991). 3 or 4 Things I Know About Him (3 o 4 cosas que sé de él). La página, encarte, pp. 108-111. (E. Pujals Gesalí, Trad.). (Original work published in 1988).
- Silliman, R. (1978). Ketjak. La página, encarte, pp. 132-135. (E. Pujals Gesalí, Trad.). (Original work published in 1978).
- Stein, G. (2025). A Box (Una caja). In Ídem lo mismo (A. Fisher and B. del Pliego, Trads.) (p. 71). Kriller. (Original work published in 1914).
- Hejinian, L. (2012). constant change figures. In The Book of a Thousand Eyes (p.177). Omnidown Publishing.
- Söderberg, A. (2023). Sound a Rose In [Vídeo]. Vimeo.
- MM Cabeza de Vaca, F. and Salgado, M. (2019). Nana de esta pequeña era (This Littler Era Lullaby) [Vídeo]. HAMACA. moving image platform.
- Tacoderaya (2020). titula este triste ánimo yop uwu [Performance recording made at Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque’s PoemRoom on 19 November 2020]
Complementary materials:
- Hejinian, L. (2000). Reason. In The Language of Inquiry (pp. 337-354). University of California Press. (Original work published in 1998).
- Andrews, B. (1990). Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis. In C. Bernstein (Ed.), The Politics of the Poetic Form (pp. 23-44). Roof Books.
- Pujals, E. (1992). Language: un proyecto radical para la escritura de fin de siglo. In La lengua radical. Antología de la poesía norteamericana contemporánea (pp. 9-32). Gramma.
- Pujals, E. and Seminario Euraca (2019). También para la poesía hacía falta un 15M. L/E/N/G/U/A/J/E/o, 2, pp. 17-23.
- Shklovski, V. (1978). El arte como artificio. In T. Todorov (Ed.), Teoría de la literatura de los formalistas rusos (pp. 55-70). Siglo XXI. (Original work published in 1917).
lunes 23 mar 2026 a las 16:00
Session 2. Against Discourse. The Political Effects of Difficulty
Work readings:
- Wittig, M. (2006). El caballo de Troya. In El pensamiento heterosexual (J. Sáez and P. Vidarte, Trads.) (pp. 95-102). Egales. (Original work published in 1984).
- Wittig, M. (2006). El punto de vista: ¿universal o particular?. In El pensamiento heterosexual (J. Sáez and P. Vidarte, Trads.) (pp. 85-93). Egales. (Original work published in 1980).
- Raimondi, S. (2018). Para una poética. Notas. Nayagua, 27, pp. 157-162.
- Chacón, P. (2013, 11 agosto). Cierta literatura actual, ¿no está a la derecha de la sociedad? [Interview with Violeta Kesselman]. Télam.
- Kesselman, V. (2017). A. Rapallo, 2, pp. 8-12.
- Perec, G. (1992). Engagement ou crise du langage. In L.G. Une aventure des années soixante (pp. 67-86). Seuil. (Original work published in 1962).
Complementary materials:
- Wittig, M. (2006). El pensamiento heterosexual. In El pensamiento heterosexual (J. Sáez and P. Vidarte, Trads.) (pp. 45-57). Egales. (Original work published in 1978).
- Wittig, M. (2006). A propósito del contrato social. In El pensamiento heterosexual (J. Sáez and P. Vidarte, Trads.) (pp. 45-57). Egales. (Original work published in 1980).
- Abello, A., Navacerrada, A., Villanueva, C. and Fernández, E. (2025, 14 november). Monique Wittig [Dossier of texts]. Jornada Infierno de los discursos, paraíso del lenguaje. Encuentro alrededor del pensamiento y la escritura de Monique Wittig, La Villana de Vallekas, Madrid.
- Kesselman, V. (2013). Intercambio sobre una organización. Blatt and Ríos.
- Raimondi, S. (2010). Poesía civil. 17grises editora (Original work published in 2001).
lunes 20 abr 2026 a las 16:00
Session 3. Forms of Non-Patriarchal Writing. Drawing from Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian
Work readings:
- Hejinian, L. (2013). My Life and My life in the Nineties. Wesleyan University Press.
- Stein, G. (1998). Patriarchal Poetry. In C. R. Stimpson and H. Chessman (Eds.), Gertrude Stein:Writings 1903-1932 (pp. 567-607). Library of America.
![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
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.