You will see a sea of stones. About Raúl Zurita
Held on 03 May 2012
In 1979 the poet Raúl Zurita (1950) founded, along with artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, the sociologist Fernando Balcells and the writer Diamela Eltit, the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte - CADA (Art Actions Collective). The actions of this collective fall within the realm of artistic activism that took hold in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s as a political reaction to the dictatorial regimes. Six years after the military coup led by Pinochet, CADA performed actions of artistic and political resistance against the dictatorship, thus giving shape to an artistic gesture that was politically-engaged, collective and public. The actions carried out by CADA determined the poetic and political character of conceptualism in Latin America. As of 2012, the CADA archive is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.
This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. With an oeuvre in which the frontiers between text, body and landscape become blurred, from the radical experience of self-inflicted harm (the photo of his burned cheek on the cover of the bookPurgatorio), to skywriting in smoke letters over New York City in 1982 and making his verse "ni pena ni miedo" a permanent part of Atacama desert in 1993, Zurita's poetry opens itself to multiple layers of meaning, including literary, political and social meaning, and reconsiders the relationship between art and life.
This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita (Editorial Delirio, 2012). Divided into three parts which have as a backdrop the afternoon of September 10th, 1973, the night that followed and the dawn of September 11th, the day of the military coup in Chile, the book's 750 pages create a fresco in which multiple voices, dreams and images converge, where poetry becomes a novel and a novel becomes history.
Participants
Sonia Betancort. She has a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature and is an educator and cultural manager.
Fernando Castro Flórez. He is a professor of Art History at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is the curator of Ni pena ni miedo. Artistas chilenos contemporáneos (MEIAC, 2012)
Fabio de la Flor. Editor-in-chief of the publishing company Editorial Delirio, he also directs the Seminario de la Universidad de Salamanca (SDLM), the PAN Festival and is a member of the burying committee of the Museum-Mausoleum of Morille.
Raúl Zurita. Poet. Winner of Chile's National Literature Prize (2000) and of the José Lezama Lima de Cuba award (2009). His books include: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), El amor de Chile (1987), Canto de los ríos que se aman (1993) El día más blanco (2000), Poemas militantes (2010), Las ciudades de agua (2006) and Cuadernos de guerra (2012).
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
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.
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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.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
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.
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Thursday, 12 February 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
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.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
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Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
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Proposal submission until 12 January, 2026
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During 2026, TEJA hosts three new residencies, each lasting three months, dedicated to supporting artists and cultural practitioners residing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, in the second half of the year, TEJA hosts three additional residencies for Gazan artists, which are offered by invitation (as Spain is currently unable to facilitate evacuations from Gaza, these invitations are coordinated through France). These residencies aim to provide a stable, creative environment and foster artistic exchange in the face of ongoing adversities. Through this new program, TEJA reaffirms its commitment to amplifying Palestinian voices and empowering artists as they navigate these turbulent times.
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