Held on 14 May 2022
“Inside the museum, one remembers the good weather outside”, the poet and historian Ángel González said in relation to the dividing line, pivotal to modern cultural institutions, between art and nature, writing and life. Opposite this dissociation, of a biopolitical nature and determined by the supposed belonging of bodies to spaces, there is a search to imagine the emancipatory capacities of writing as a bioliterary force: a way of opening worlds through the aesthetic experience of language and the political experience of fiction. Thus, before disciplinary mechanisms this possible “writing for life” defends the capacity of writing to convene the parameters of an alternative reality and situate us — affectively, sensitively, intellectually — in another plane, creating in this same displacement the joint transformation of our lives in the world. Therefore, in duplicating and cancelling material conditions, investigating and denouncing them, forging alliances and invoking destinies, writing projects from the symbolic still allow us, as Walt Whitman would have wished, “to imagine being all people to be someone”. From such displacement, literature is regarded as an artform, as an articulation of imagery in language, of the history of writing, of bodies in language and biography in history.
Bioliteratures 1 is conceived as a series of sessions in which writing forms converge around authors whose careers defy distances between subject and language, between the self and us, between the public and the private. For this first session, made up of two round-table discussions, the literary work of Rafael Chirbes, which speaks to us of disarticulated and violent nature intrinsically constituting our times, has been selected. Is literature that does not make commitments truly committed literature? The memory of repression, the dignity of poverty, the suppression of memory, the marks of class on the body, crossed interests and desires, literary history as an alternative national history, polyphony as a factory of subjectivity and construction as a poetic legacy for a future democracy are themes which, from Chirbes’s literary world, still interrogate us.
This reflection on the author’s writings with critics, writers and readers leads to a more open relationship between his rich corpus of literature and essays being created, circumventing homage, mythification, the idea of the writer as an institution or the typically posthumous fallout following the reception of his Diarios [Diaries] (Anagrama, 2021). In putting forward the possibility of a role-author, we imagine modes of writing that capture the possibilities and contradictions of an era and ways of existing in it, our ghosts reflected in a body of language, glimpsed in motion like shadows by a river.
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David Becerra Mayor is a professor of Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has worked as a professor and post-doctoral researcher at Université de Liège and Université catholique in Louvain, and is the author of La novela de la no-ideología (Tierradenadie, 2013), La Guerra Civil como moda literaria (Clave Intelectual, 2015) and Después del acontecimiento. El retorno de lo político en la literatura española tras el 15-M (Bellaterra, 2021), and is coordinator of the monograph Convocando al fantasma. Novela crítica en la España actual (Tierradenadie ediciones, 2015). Furthermore, he has overseen the critical edition of La mina, by Armando López Salinas (AKAL, 2013), and Alejo Carpentier’s La consagración de la primavera (AKAL, 2015). He is the director of the collection of essays from the publishing house Hoja de Lata and is in charge of the Aesthetics and Literature Section at the Foundation for Marxist Studies.
Natalia Castro Picón is an assistant professor at Princeton University. She earned a degree in Hispanic Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid and a PhD from the City University of New York, and was a grantee at the Antonio Gala Foundation for young creators from 2013 to 2014. She has published the poetry collections La intermitencia de los faros (Canalla Ediciones, 2013) and La misma piedra (Tenerife, 2016), with her main fields of study modern and contemporary Iberian literature and culture, as well as transatlantic Iberian relations in a neoliberal context. In her research and classes, she combines tools and methods from Cultural Studies with a glottopolitical perspective.
Clara Derrac Soria is an art historian and researcher. She was a 2019–2021 Fulbright scholar and holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of Columbia in New York and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Complutense University of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Madrid and Museo Reina Sofía. She is currently the beneficiary of a Banco de España – Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía grant for training in public activities projects inside the museum sphere.
Sara Mesa was born in Madrid but has lived in Seville since childhood. She is the author of six novels and three books of stories, most notably Cuatro por cuatro (2012, Herralde Prize finalist), Cicatriz (2015, RNE Critical Eye Award), Cara de pan (2018) and Un amor (selected as Book of the Year in 2020 in El País, El Cultural and La Vanguardia), as well as the volume of stories Mala letra (2016) and the essay Silencio administrativo. La pobreza en el laberinto burocrático (2019), all published by Anagrama. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
Rosario Peiró is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area.
Juan Manuel Ruiz Casado holds a degree in Philology. His professional career encompasses journalism, gastronomy and viniculture, and he was previously editor-in-chief of the magazine Sobremesa and director of the tasting panel on the same publication. He is currently head of Enoteca Barolo’s tasting programme and activities.
Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz has worked as a poet, storyteller, essayist and columnist since 1977. He holds a degree in Law, working in advocacy from 1974 to the late 1980s. In 2001, he won the Prince of Viana Award for Culture. He is the author of an extensive bibliography, his novels most notably including La gran ilusión (Seix Barral, 1989, Euskadi Prize for Literature and the Herralde Prize for Fiction), Los papeles del ilusionista (Anagrama, 1990), No existe tal lugar (Anagrama, 1997, National Book Critics Award, 1998), La flecha del miedo (Anagrama, 2000), El Escarmiento (Pamiela, 2013), Perorata del insensato (Pamiela, 2015), Diablada boliviana (Pamiela, 2018), Moriremos nosotros también (Pamiela, 2021) and the literary memoirs Viaje alrededor de mi cuarto (Pamiela, 2021). In 2001, he published his entire corpus of poetry work to date in La marca del cuadrante (Pamiela, 2001). Notable among his studies and work on Pío Baroja are Derrotero de Pío Baroja (2000), Opiniones y paradojas (2000) and Pío Baroja, a escena (2006), Tiempos de tormenta (2007), and the editing and study of the unpublished novel Miserias de la guerra (2006). He also runs the blog Vivir de buena gana.
Rodrigo Terrasa is a journalist. He holds a degree in Information Sciences and started out as an intern at SuperDeporte, before moving on to El Mundo in Valencia as a staff writer in the Sports section. In 2007, he started to work on the digital edition of the newspaper and, in 2015, moved to the editorial department of El Mundo in Madrid to write about politics. At the present time, he writes for Papel, El Mundo’s daily magazine. He is also author of the book La ciudad de la euforia (Libros del K.O, 2021), chronicling some of the most infamous cases of corruption in the Community of Valencia over two decades.
Isabelle Touton is head professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, in Bordeaux. From Cultural Studies, she works on literature and Spanish visual literature (comics, graphic humour and documentary) and, with a sociological gaze, on the literary field, feminism and current Spanish social movements. Among other volumes, she is the author of Intrusas. 20 conversaciones con mujeres escritoras (Institución Fernando el Católico, 2018) and the editor, with Jorge Cagiao, of the collective book España después del 15M (Los Libros de la Catarata, 2019). She also recently co-directed the collective book Trazos de memoria, trozos de historia. Cómic y franquismo (Marmotilla, 2021).
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Programme
Saturday, 14 May 2022
4:30pm Table 1. Reading and Writing to Rafael Chirbes
Participants
Sara Mesa. Writing Is to Open Our Gaze to the Half-light. Ideas and Style in Rafael Chirbes
David Becerra. Literature, Memory and Crisis. Reading from Rafael Chirbes
Isabelle Touton. Conflicts Created by the Work of Rafael Chirbes
Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz. Rafael Chirbes, from the Disappointment to the Pillory of His Time
Moderated by: Clara Derrac Soria
6:45pm Table 2. The Memory We Don’t Speak of
Participants:
Rodrigo Terrasa. Chirbes or the Structure of Power: Theory of a Collective Suicide
Natalia Castro Picón. The Artisan and the Museum. The Art of Hospitality in Rafael Chirbes
Juan Manuel Ruiz Casado. Damage as the Engine of Narration
Moderated by: Rosario Peiró
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Programme
Bioliteraturas
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of
Participants
Participants
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Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
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.
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From 5 to 28 February 2026 – check programme
Over this coming month of February, the Museo organises a complete retrospective on the filmography of Oliver Laxe. The series converses with the work HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, an installation by the Sirāt director conceived specifically for the Museo Reina Sofía’s Espacio 1, and includes the four feature-length films Laxe has made to date, as well as his short films and a four-session carte blanche programme, in which he will select works that chime with his films and creative concerns.
Oliver Laxe’s gaze is one of the most unique in the contemporary film landscape, his film-making a resilient, spiritual and transcultural space imbued with a cultural and social nomadism that reflects his life and beliefs and which, fundamentally, puts forward an anti-materialist ethic to deal with our times. His filmography, characterised by profound spirituality, a time of contemplation and a close connection to nature and the sacred, approaches universal themes such as redemption and the meaning of existence via stories that extend across remote, rural and timeless landscapes, and with atmospheres that draw on western and police film genres. His protagonists, largely amateur actors, cross through physical territories while travelling on inner journeys consumed by guilt, the desire for community reintegration and the realisation of an end goal they ignore. Nature, particularly desert and landscape, is another character, a living, pantheistic presence that conditions and reflects human conflicts. Stretched-out time, a focus on sensory experience and allusions to ancient religion situate us in a meditative conception of film which seeks to be a manifesto to re-enchant the world.
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Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo
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In addition to founding arte vivo, Alberto Greco was an informalist painter, a queer flâneur, a poet and sometime actor. This intense journey of Greco’s life and art is closely connected to the migrant route he embarked upon in 1950 in Buenos Aires, taking in Atacama and Humahuaca, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Genoa, Rome, Madrid, Piedralaves, New York and Ibiza and ending abruptly in Barcelona, where he took his own life shortly after writing his final great work, the novel Besos brujos (Bewitching Kisses, 1965).
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