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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
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.
![Blake Edwards, The Party [El guateque], 1968, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-14.jpg.webp)
Blake Edwards. The Party
Saturday, 15 August 2026
In The Party, actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is mistakenly invited to a glamorous dinner party in Hollywood. His curiosity and two left feet lead to one funny mishap after the other. During the soiree he consoles Michèle, a young actress who has been fired by her producer, and the chaos gathers momentum when Bakshi accidentally opens a retractable floor, making the guests fall into a swimming pool. A small hippie-style elephant gatecrashes the party, brought by a group of young people, and Bakshi asks the guests to wash the elephant as it is a sacred animal in his country. The house fills with soap suds, culminating in a wackily chaotic party.
When Stanley Kubrick was once asked who Peter Sellers was, he replied: “There is no such person as Peter Sellers”. The Party is one of the most widely recognised comedies in the history of film, its director Blake Edwards and the English actor making an entertaining critique of a fading conservative society. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s fit into the container of a choppy swimming pool: people from high society, an elephant, a Russian ballet, waiters, beatnik youth… similar to Sellers’s own identity: an empty vessel that can be refilled. In the film, Edwards tapped into the ingenious actor’s innate improvisation and the swimming pool as a container for revolutionary intent.
Lucrecia Martel. La ciénaga (The Swamp)
Viernes 21 de agosto, 2026
A couple of families spend the summer in a country cottage. The relationship between them exposes a crisis. The alcoholism of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) becomes clear, leading to a drift in the education of their children and impacting relationships of respect and affect. Weariness expresses the lackadaisical environment.
In La ciénaga Lucrecia Martel approaches the decadence of a middle-class Argentinian family. The pool of dirty, stagnant water reflects the economic and social collapse of a whole country, yet reflects more than economic crisis as it becomes a murky well feeding off the pain of those living in the house. An erstwhile space of joy, the swimming pool becomes a reflection of adult depression, resulting in apathy. And the children, especially the girls, seem to be the only people awake in this drift. Barring a flicker of unawareness, the young people immerse themselves in rainwater or the water from the river, in water that flows, but are cautious of getting too close to the swimming pool.
![Yorgos Lanthimos, Kynodontas [Canino], 2009, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-16_00.jpg.webp)
Yorgos Lanthimos. Dogtooth
Saturday, 22 August 2026
A couple with three adult children live in a modern country cottage. A large swimming pool takes centre stage in a sizeable garden. The property is skirted by a large fence that blocks a view of the outside. Here, the father has educated his children without outside contact, maintaining their belief in a false world: aeroplanes fall in the garden like toys and they must act like dogs to defend themselves from the ferocious cats that surround the house. The promise of going out into the world when they lose their dogtooth is proof of their maturity.
Lanthimos builds a world that is surreal, comical and terrible. The swimming pool is the house’s central element, a limited, controlled space assimilated like the sea, yet under the father’s supervision. A space of imagination, but with sinister intentions: the children are indoctrinated under the water as they believe in a better world. Far from reality. The swimming pool’s limits are the limits of their freedom, a false state of well-being expressed in the weightless bodies in the water. The liquid element is an analgesic magma with the power to educate offspring under the latent fear of a shark bite.
![Binka Zhelyazkova, Baseynat [La piscina], 1977, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-17_00.png.webp)
Binka Zhelyazkova. The Swimming Pool
Viernes 28 de agosto, 2026
The young, bright Bella (Yanina Kasheva), after unforeseen heartbreak at her graduation party, meets Apostol (Kosta Tsonev), a reserved architect, and Boyan (Kliment Denchev), a comedy actor who is cynical about his country. The three characters climb up to a diving board in a municipal swimming pool, where they begin a strange relationship of friendship, love and despair which reflects a generational clash.
Binka Zhelyazkova, the great enfant terrible of Eastern European cinema, critic of the communist system and widely acclaimed film-maker beyond Bulgarian borders, made in The Swimming Pool a masterly metaphor for a country in decline. The public pool symbolises a closed, immovable enclosure where society is festering. From the height of a diving board she sees, in a panoptic view, the different generations living underneath a limited space. On one side, older people attempt to preserve the old revolutionary spirit with constant collective swimming exercises while, on the other, young people don’t hide the desire for freedom that remains unrealised. The result is an ideological clash in how to act and move in the enclosure, unearthing vast hypocrisy in the lost ideals of socialism, reflected in the total apathy of youth. The Swimming Pool for Zhelyazkova is a reflection of the disillusionment and existential void of a whole country and system.