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Friday, 21 September
Sabatini Building, Vaults Gallery
Museo Reina Sofía
6:30 pm – 7 pm
Janneke van der PuttenJanneke van der Putten is a Dutch performer and visual artist. Employing techniques learned during years of training, she uses her voice as an instrument in order to explore different environments physically, sonically and emotionally. Her work moves away from the usual modern parameters of amplification and synthesis, focusing instead on the body’s resonance in the here and now.
7 pm – 7:30 pm
Agnès PeMadrid-based musicologist of the non-common, Agnès Pe’s work transcends all genre boundaries. After her eclectic and overwhelming session in Archipelago’s first edition, this year she presents an intense performance where MIDI files will be twisted beyond recognition while generating new (a)rhythmic forms and structures. Low-fi and hi-physicality computer music with a playful and unstoppable attitude: all or nothing.
7:30 pm – 8 pm
HashigakariHashigakari take his name from Japanese noh theatre. Based in Madrid, their members David Area (electronics) and Tomás Gris (miscellaneous instruments and objects) focus on free improvisation and reductionism. They draw inspiration from the Onkyo Japanese music movement and the work of the likes of Wandelweiser, for whom silence is not only an aesthetic resource but also the origin of an event. Area and Gris run Ex-Nihilo record label and are also members of maDam ensemble, GRS collective, and Nanimo Quartet.
8 pm – 8:30 pm
Clara de AsísClara de Asís is a Spanish composer and guitarist based in France. Her performances highlight simplicity and active listening as means of music-making. Asís uses electroacoustics to manipulate combinations of objects, materials and sound sources from a minimal approach. Her last album, Do Nothing (2018), is a suite in which the sounds produced between two actions are let to “live” by themselves, with revealing results for the listener.
8:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Cedrik FermontBorn in former Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), brought up in Belgium and currently based in Berlin, Cedrik Fremont went deep into the domains of electronic music and noise in 1989. His performance in Archipelago will consist of a session based on the research and dissemination of different experimental music scenes from a number of African and Asian countries. Fremont has curated several anthologies through his record label Syrphe and is the author of various essays, including Not your world music. Noise in South East Asia (2016), co-authored with Dimitri della Faie.
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Sabatini Building, Garden
Museo Reina Sofía
7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
TutuBased in Barcelona, dj Gemma Planell (Tutu) has travelled extensively performing in some of the festivals (Atonal, TodaysArt, Sónar) that set how part of the music currently made in Europe is understood. Her sessions usually begin with recordings of bird noises and morning races, whose rhythmic patterns provide a base from which she builds a continuum of dark and intense textures. The starting point of her performance in Archipelago will be an outdoors sunset, a listening environment very different from that of electronic music clubs.
8:30 pm – 10 pm
ToukadimeToukadime means “to present” in Arabic. It is a term that can be frequently heard in many Maghrebi analogical recordings from the 20th century. Since 2011, it is also the name of a project by French djs Bachir and Krimau aimed at preserving and disseminating this sound heritage, which they have gathered together in an imposing vinyl series as well as in online digitisations, radio shows, and sessions for the dance floor as the one they will be presenting at Archipelago.
10:15 pm – 11:30 pm
Ammar 808Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef re-interprets traditional Maghrebi compositions from a futurist perspective, while he denounces the cruelty of frontiers and struggles to overcome separatism by valorising differences. In Archipelago he will be presenting the first release of his project Ammar 808, Maghreb United. In Maghreb United the hypnotic sound of the gasba and the zokra intermingle with the legendary 808 drum machine, a device essential for genres such as electro and techno, which are now well-established but were ground-breaking at their beginning.
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Saturday, 22 September
Real Conservatorio Superior de Música
Performance on the organ of Manuel de Falla Auditorium
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Áine O'DwyerÁine O'Dwyer is an Irish harp player, singer, composer, improviser and visual artist with a reputation in experimental music for her unusual approach to organ. Her heterodox work explores the acoustic potential of the instrument without leaving aside the organ’s relationship with its habitual spatial contexts and their sacred dimension. In Archipelago, O’Dwyer will present a site-specific performance on the organ of Manuel de Falla Auditorium.
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Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Museo Reina Sofía
6 pm – 7 pm
Tarawangsawelas + Rabih BeainiFrom Indonesia, Bandung-based Teguh Permana and Wisnu Ridwana will perform together their unique rendering of tarawangsa, a ritual and ceremonial music from Sunda, in West Java. They will play the tarawangsa (a two-stringed violin of sorts) and the jentreng (a seven-stringed zither), accompanied by the unclassifiable Lebanese artist Rabih Beaini, also known as Morphosis, who will process the duo’s sound and take it to new, unexpected paths.
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Sabatini Building, Garden
Museo Reina Sofía
7:15 pm – 8:15 pm
Nadah El ShazlyCairo-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Nadah El Shazly’s first release, Ahwar (2017), has been critically acclaimed in the specialised media and is an excellent introduction to Cairo’s vibrating music scene. Yet to be discovered in Spain, in Archipelago Shazly will present the personal musical discourse that articulates her songs: impro strategies and electronic music intermingle with elements of 20th-century Arab folk music and do so without nostalgia, making the most of this heritage’s relevance and renovating power.
8:30 pm – 9:30 pm
ErrorsmithAfter a 13-year wait, we celebrate the release of the latest solo album of German musician Erik Wiegand (Errorsmith), Superlative Fatigue (2017). The album’s title, which refers to its extenuating creative process, could also describe the tiredness induced by the repetition of out-dated and predictable formulas in some music genres – something from which Errorsmith has always exceled at escaping. Wiegland is the creator of the Razor synthesiser – a cornerstone of the album sound – and member of MMM (together with Berghain’s resident dj Fiedel), and of Smith N Hack (together with Frank Timm from Soundstream)
9:45 pm – 11:15 pm
DJ LagGqom is a music genre from the suburbs of Durban, South Africa, which uniquely blends broken beats, percussive minimalism and a variety of elements from hip-hop, house and even maskandi (Zulu folk music). At his young age, Lwazi Asanda Gwala (Dj Lag) has managed to catapult this eminently local style to a global scale, thanks to overwhelming and effervescent sessions like the one that will be closing this edition of Archipelago.
Held on 21 Sep 2018
In its second edition, Archipelago asserts its approach to listening as a form of both knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. Attendants are encouraged to approach the complexities of the cotemporary world not only through the ear, but also through the body, by absorbing sound with all their organs and bones.
This year the number of participant artists grows and the venues diversify: shows will be held at the Garden of Sabatini Building, the the Vaults Gallery and the Auditorium, as well as in the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, located next to the Museo.
If something characterised music at the beginning of the 21st century, it was a paralysis of sorts – an alleged incapacity to contribute something new to history, understood as a continuous linear progress. In order to overcome the institutionalisation affecting and somehow isolating experimentation, in 2018 new geographical references are being explored in a quest for the origins and echoes in folklore and popular traditions, a source from which innovation continuously feeds. Simultaneously, new forms of listening are being proposed that implicate the body through dance.
In Experimentalisms in practice. Music perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press 2018), authors Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid define music experimentation not as a universal concept but as a notion located in relation to the specific contexts where it emerges. Although experimentation can be understood as a synonym of quest – or as that which “has no limits”, according to Michael Nyman –, in recent years it has been burdened by predetermined formulas that are mostly derived from Eurocentric and English-speaking-centric conceptions. Such formulas seem to claim implicitly that all music expressions beyond their own sound and geographic limits lack the self-proclaimed capacity to look forward into the future in a progressive way.
This feeling of exhaustion – which has turned into a Zeitgeist – has also brought about a turn into the past: artists listen to the sound archive of the previous century with new ears, looking for alternatives to a canon built on the basis of already exhausted narratives and genealogies.
Without aiming at building a new hierarchy, the artists participating in this edition embody music proposals from different geographical locations and practices that help make known new historical contexts and projects, as well as new music futures.
With the technical support of
Laboratorio de Informática y Electrónica Musical-LIEM, Centro de Tecnología del Espectáculo-CTE, Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música-INAEM y Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid-RCSMM
Curatorship
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsorship
Más actividades
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 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.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
![Joseph Kosuth. One and Three Chairs [Una y tres sillas]](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/joseph_kosuth.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter III
Monday 11, Wednesday 13 and Thursday 14 May 2026 - Registration deadline extended
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.
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.
First session of the third chapter focuses on the transformation of the artwork in the context and wake of Conceptual art. The very notion of the artwork, together with its ownership and authenticity, is reconsidered from a broad perspective open to new and alternative models of management, which could ultimately transform the relationship between artist, artwork and owner. Can some of the practices in question serve as critical models? To what extent is it possible to think and act with them, and extrapolate from them, beyond a beautiful niche?
The second session turns to the question of representation. While many (but not all) human natural persons can, in principle, represent themselves in legal matters, other needs representatives. This goes for minors as well for adults who have been placed under legal guardianship; it applies to fictitious persons such as corporations and states, who need human representatives to sign contracts or defend them in court. We will look into the question of legal representation in conjunction with other forms of representation, in the cultural as well as political register—taking cues from Spivak’s distinction between portrait (Darstellung) and proxy (Vertretung), which is an unstable and historically mutable one.
The seminar concludes with a closing session dedicated to collectively revisiting and reflecting on the themes and discussions that have emerged throughout the first Studies Constellation Residency Program.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?
School of SUP: Trash Cinema Session
Thursday 30 April 2026 – 7pm
The deranged study plan by School of SUP, an equipo1821 development, brings to public attention their unique display of classwork with this screening. The session shows three short films made with analogue cameras, written and edited by and starring, collectively, students in pure DIY style, followed by a presentation of American SUP (2026), a feature-length and irreverent trash film by Soy una pringada and Dani Tezla.
American SUP (2026) is a US road trip through the American Midwest, recorded with a camera from 1997, in which YouTuber, DJ, cultural agitator and cult internet personality Soy una pringada and Dani Tezla direct and star in an adventure with no shortage of stellar appearances and impossible settings: the home of American Football, a corpse store, the Rainforest Café storm, a Cannibal Corpse gig, a basement in Minnesota, foul hotels, cuck chairs and a clown-filled hall of fame. The film is a lo-fi, folk-tinged version of American Gothic, a genre practised by film-makers such as George Kuchar, Harmony Korine and Sean Price Williams.
This session, moreover, is articulated with the core strands of the equipo1821 education programme School of SUP. Film, Art and Nihilism in the 1990s, which, through film — mainly from the 1990s — explores different underground practices, urban cultures, crossovers of art with popular culture and a kind of generational adolescent angst as background noise.