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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.
Archipelago 2018
Concert series
- Live Arts
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
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8, 22 OCT, 5, 19 NOV, 3, 17, 31 DIC 2025,14, 28 ENE, 11, 25 FEB, 11, 25 MAR, 8, 22 ABR, 6, 20 MAY, 3, 17 JUN 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
Rethinking Guernica
21, 28, 22, 29 SEP, 5, 12, 19, 26, 6, 13, 20, 27 OCT, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 3, 10, 17, 24 NOV, 7, 14, 21, 28, 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 DIC 2025
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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.
![Francesc Abad, Procés transformació [Proceso transformación, 1972]. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/AD05219-009-actividad.jpg.webp)
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
29 SEP, 2, 6, 9 OCT 2025
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 two-hour 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.
This first chapter of the seminar, composed of four sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes four sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios; and international law, through the work of British writer China Miéville.
Through these and other readings, case study analyses, and collective discussions, the seminar aims to open a space for critical reflection on the ways in which the law—both juridical form and legal form—is performed and exceeded by artistic and activist practices, as well as by theoretical and political approaches that challenge its foundations and contemporary projections.