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September 18, 2013
Helado negro
Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange by name, was born in Florida in 1980. His childhood was marked by the music of the soundsystems and radios that were heard all over his neighbourhood, and the bands that played at the traditional popular events, and this is the environment that ended up shaping his work.
He has collaborated on occasion with Prefuse 73 and he produced its most recent album, Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian (Warp, 2010). Lange belongs to the generation of U.S.-born artists of Latin origin who have created a new musical context in which their roots merge with anglo-saxon musical structures. His last album, Invisible Life (2013), released through Asthmatic Kitty (Sufjan Stevens's label), includes collaborations with Devendra Banhart and Jan St. Werner from Mouse on Mars. Helado Negro also works with Julianna Barwick in the project OMBRE. -
September 25, 2013
Kalabrese
Behind Kalabrese is Sacha Winkler, an important figure in today's music scene in Zurich. Dj, producer and owner of Club Zukunft, Kalabrese released Rumpelzirkus (Stattmusik) in 2007. References such as Thomas Brinkmann, Ricardo Villalobos and Matthew Herbert are useful for understanding his work.
Kalabrese has also remixed artists and labels such as Tosca, Crosstown Rebels, dOP and Filewile. Over the past two years he has travelled on the international club circuit and taken part in festivals such as Sonar, Mutek and Transmediale Berlin. Kalabrese's new record, Independent Dancer (2013), follows the road that Rumpelzirkus started out on but its compositions have become more dynamic and intense. -
October 2, 2013
Carmen Villain
Carmen Villain used to combine a career in fashion with the writing of the songs that would become her debut album, Sleeper (2013). Released through the label Smalltown Supersound, the album represents her departure from the world of fashion. Carmen was born in the United States, lives in London, is half Norwegian and half Mexican, a blend that can be felt in all of her compositions.
Sleeper is a record full of feedbacks and shoegazing, coproduced by Emil Nikolaisen (Serena-Maneesh) and mastered by Bob Weston, of Shellac. Smalltown Supersound also released an EP with Prins Thomas and Optimo remixes. -
October 9, 2013
Amateur Best
Five years have passed since Joe Flory began his music career as Primary 1. He made his first album, Other People, in 2010 and then disappeared from the music scene to work in graphic design and illustration. Three years later, Flory returns with a new project, Amateur Best, and a new record, No Thrills (2013), released through Double Denim (Hari Ashurst's label and frequent collaborator at Pitchfork). No Thrills is an autobiographical album, brimming with references to his childhood, his fascination with pop and his discovery of Michael Jackson's music, and it also contains a number of collaborations, such as that of Chilly Gonzales. Amateur Best is a techno pop mixed with soul and it was meticulously produced.
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October 16, 2013
Serengeti
The MC and producer from Chicago, Serengeti, has released over 14 records in 10 years. He has worked with several of his colleagues at the Anticon label, including Yoni Wolf from WHY?, Odd Nosdam, Doseone and also Sufjan Stevens, among others. Serengeti's projects have almost always oscillated between the introspective tone he used in records such as C.A.R. (Anticon, 2012) and the most recent Saal (Graveface, 2013), the rap of Bells & Floating World (Polyphonic) and the electronics of Family & Friends (2011), with Owen Ashworth from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.
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October 23, 2013
Emika
Emika is the artistic name of Ema Jolly, a British artist of Czech origin who grew up in Milton Keynes, England, where she studied classical piano and composition. At the age of 17 she moved to Bristol and there she discovered the city's bass scene at its height and met artists such as Pinch and Loefah from Digital Mystikz. After completing studies in Musical Technology she settled in Berlin, where she works for Native Instruments. Her solo debut, the EP Double Edge (Ninja Tune, 2010), combined dubstep bases with her own voice and at the end of 2011 she released her first full album, named after the artist and recorded in collaboration with Rashad Becker.
In Berlin she discovered the club Berghain, where she would begin to make field recordings with which she created a library of sounds that would later become the foundation of the compilation “n”, released through stgut on (the club's label) and with the participation of all the club's resident DJs. In her most recent album, DVA (2013), lyrics take on greater importance and the sounds are more accessible.
Held on 18, 25 sep, 02, 09, 16, 23 oct 2013
Acoustic Space returns to Museo Reina Sofía this September. The concert series began in 2010 as a way for the Museum to make a place in its programming for the wide range of currents in today's heterogeneous musical scene.
Now, with the structures that sustained the 20th century musical industry broken, the expansion of Internet has set off a process by which musical styles are being fragmented into a broad diversity of sub-styles, all with access to a global market. As a result, over the last 20 years an international music scene has been developing in which voices that previously had little chance of being heard now form part of a new industry that allows myriad sound realities to co-exist with one another, each one adding complexity and diversity to the scene.
This is the point of departure for Acoustic Space, a series of deeply-nuanced performances that allow for faithful expression of personal musical identity, with artists such as Peter Broderick, Bugge Wesseltoft, Shigeto, Cibelle, Nils Frahm and Colin Stetson, who have participated in previous editions.
This time the series features a selection of artists who have released, all of them, a new album in 2013. The musical proposals include the organic house style of the Swiss Kalabrese, the mix of Latin sounds with electronic structures by Helado Negro, the distorted guitars of the Norwegian Carmen Villain, the emotional synthpop of Amateur Best, the lean productions of Chicago's MC Serengeti and the pop with synthetic atmospheres and vocal lines by the Brit Emika.
Sponsorship
Mahou
![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
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
23, 24, 25, 30, 31 OCT 2025
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros