Archipielago 2020
Held on 18 sep 2020
For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies. The present edition continues to conduct research into that popular repertory as a form transmitting knowledge, questioning the globalising principles associated with notions such as experimentation and avant-garde.
Mix, transmission and mutation are terms which, musically, can have a positive meaning, and are aspects this concert series has always embraced. Yet today these words have become imbued with a negative connotation, reflecting the shift towards the hermeticism of nation states and their borders: How will contemporary music genres be affected? What about the different sound communities scattered around the world? To what degree will it impact the practices of an entire generation of musicians? And the live music experience? How will local aspects be re-signified in this new setting? How will networks be re-built in a world where the freedom of movement and contact of bodies are limited?
In dealing with these enquiries, the latest edition of Archipelago assumes a novel format: all acts will take place outdoors in the Sabatini Building Garden via a quadrophonic arrangement of sound, placing the stress on the physicality of sound and offering DJ-led listening sessions, whilst drawing inspiration from the experience of diaspora. Concerts which look to reinvent popular culture and speculate on what is in store and on constructing in a particularly unpredictable future.
Programme
Friday, 18 September – from 7pm to 9pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
7pm - Cher-ee-lee
Cher-ee-lee is the moniker Jerilyn Gonçalves uses for her sessions and podcasts, some of which have featured on digital platforms such as Radio Relativa and KRAAK. Of note is her radio show Música para Camaleones (Music for Chameleons), in which she traces the plurality of directions taken by Venezuela’s sound heritage, within and beyond its borders, with the project leading Gonçalves to study her country’s music with the aim of, as she puts it, “building a home away from home”. Cher-ee-lee is a native from Caracas who had to move to Madrid, integrating into the community of Venezuelan expatriates settled in Spain, the largest in Europe. For Archipelago she leads a session around the captivating musical syncretism of Venezuela and its subsequent influence on manifestations of contemporary experimentation. In short, an invitation to discover an uncommon narrative on Venezuela’s fertile culture and history.
8pm - Jessica Ekomane
Rhythm, tone, time and space are probably the four variables that define the compositions of this French artist, residing in Berlin, who is a great admirer of Györgi Ligeti and Maryanne Amacher. In Archipelago, she performs a concert which, through the use of a quadrophonic system and the immersive nature of her sonic landscapes, seeks to trigger a cathartic effect among the audience as she employs her experience of making installations in which psychoacoustics are at the core. Ekomane’s pieces, moreover, depart from an investigation into the relationships between individual perception and collective dynamics, between listening and its social determinants. Multivocal (2019), her debut album, aptly demonstrates her rigorous aesthetics and working methodology — seemingly static, but ever-changing, to the point of inducing a kind of trance in the listener.
Saturday, 19 September – from 1pm to 2pm
Doors open at 12:30pm
1pm - Lucrecia Dalt
In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.
Saturday, 19 September – from 6pm to 9pm
Doors open at 5:30pm
6pm - Jokkoo (Baba Sy & Mbodj)
The Jokkoo collective came into being in Barcelona in 2017 to disseminate music and sound narratives from the African continent and its diasporas. Despite a markedly electronic identity, their sounds did not find a place on the dance floors of the Catalan city. Thus, Baba Sy and Mbodj (Maguette Dieng) — joined by Opoku, Mookie and B4mba over the past year — decided to bring this musical ebullience to the fore at parties, events and a programme on the radio station Dublab, with reference points most notably including genres which, with a cosmic and futurist spirit, seek to transform the analysis of the past and foreground the present. This guided listening session focuses on the inheritance and echoes of the black Atlantic, a sound journey that is also an account of certain histories that closely run through this duo.
7pm - Tarta Relena
Tarta Relena is a Catalan duo, made up of Marta Torrella (contralto) and Helena Ros (soprano), that explores, a cappella, the sonorities of different oral tradition music and singer-songwriters related to the Mediterranean. Both came into contact with polyphony via choral music, leading them to explore renaissance and baroque repertoires, in addition to their background in musicology (Marta) and linguistics (Helena), which goes some way towards explaining their performances of ancient Sephardic, Greek, Corsican and Menorcan songs. Whilst respecting tradition, their aim is not to perpetuate it and both are quick to avoid any glimmer of purism — thus, they accept with humour the tag “progressive Gregorian” in defining their music. For Archipelago they put forward a concert that reflects the achievements of their outstanding debut, Ora pro nobis (2019), and more recently Intercede pro nobis (2020), a work which welcomes the introduction of subtle electronic arrangements.
8pm - Lucrecia Dalt
In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.
With the sponsorship of:
Curators:
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Collaboration:
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsorship:
![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
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.
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?
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.