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Wednesday, 18 September / From 7:30pm to 9:30pm
Practical workshop on Udlot Udlot, by José Maceda
Municipal School of Music and Dance, Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera (Calle de la Farmacia, 13)
Udlot Udlot was composed by José Maceda in 1975 “for hundreds or thousands of performers” in Manila (Philippines). For its performance 200 instruments have been reconstructed, under the instructions of the composer, including 50 kalu-tang (sticks), avakkao/balingbing (buzzers), 50 tongatong (stamping tubes) and 50 tungali (flutes). The piece demonstrates Maceda’s interest in traditional music and instruments from Southeast Asia.
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Thursday, 19 September / From 7:45pm to 8:30pm
Miguel Nava and Rafa Martín
Iglesia de San Millán y San Cayetano (Calle de Embajadores, 15)
Miguel Nava is a music and scholar responsible for recovering the mountain pipe, an instrument made from cane, wood and bone, typical in the Madrid mountains. Rafael Martín, meanwhile, is a musicologist and medieval historian, and a performer and scholar of the hurdy-gurdy, a medieval bowed instrument operated with a handle and 21 keys and often used as a basso continuo. Both teach classes at Entresierras, a traditional School of Music and Dance in Madrid’s Sierra Norte.
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Friday, 20 September
Program Friday
Museo Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Rashad Becker 6:30pm
A Berlin-based composer and musician who conceives his pieces as multi-layered narratives, populated by a set of sonic entities, some obtrusive, some timid, and others ready to surrender. There is often shades of tragicomedy in his work, a kind of cartoon version of what could be a requiem of a dream (or simply a ritualistic fertility dance from another dimension). His recent works include the two-volume series Traditional Music Of Notional Species released on the PAN label and a multi-part work called Based On A True Story, which draws inspiration from historical events in a kind of “sonic staging”. Along similar lines, Becker collaborates with the contemporary orchestra Alarm Will Sound, from New York, and the Derlin Kaleidoskop string ensemble, from Berlin.
Ipek Gorgun 7:15pm
A Turkish sound artist and composer who works in the field of electroacoustic music. Her output is characterised by dense, intricate narratives that swing between calm and tranquil vignettes and dense landscapes, where sound appears to bring down the structures articulating it. This is substantiated in her collaborations with artists like Egyptrixx and Fennesz, and her own albums Aphelion (2016) and Ecce Homo (2018), the latter of which sets forth an exploration into the human capacity to produce both beauty and destruction.
Sabatini Building, Vaults Gallery
Nina García 8pm
French improviser Nina García presents her solo project Mariachi. Her concerts in electric guitar are a classic example of unbridled energy, with García’s approach to such an iconic instrument like the guitar an exploration of its potential, yet without attempting to exhaust its sound palette. Like the sculpting of objects, the sonic matter, her expression as a performer and the instruments all become the acts of the artist in a constantly evolving indissoluble whole.
Saba Alizadeh 8:30pm
A sound and visual artist and a master on the kamancheh, an Iranian spike fiddle, Saba Alizadeh is one of the pre-eminent names in Iran’s musical landscape. Alizadeh is the son of internationally renowned musician Hossein Alizadeh and the founder of Noise Works, a platform for disseminating sound experimentation in his native Tehran. For this programme the artist will perform a concert in line with his excellent Scattered Memories (2018), an album that seeks to synthesise Iranian music with contemporary electronic music.
Gaba 9:15pm
A project created in 2018 by Enrique Garoz de Diego and Garazi Gorostiaga, two prominent musicians in Spain’s underground scene. Although Gorostiaga recently released her debut album Irauten (2017), Enrique has been releasing scores of productions over the past decade under different pseudonyms, including Tube Tentacles. Moreover, he has collaborated with pioneers in the noise scene, for instance The Haters and Toshiji Mikawa (from Incapacitants). Gaba, therefore, offers dark atmospheres and interludes of coarser noise, drawing inspiration from science fiction imagery and esoterism.
Sabatini Building, Garden
Síria 8pm
Síria is a new project by Portuguese artist Diana Combo, in which her voice is added to her usual practice as EOSIN, a previous project, where she combined field recordings and vinyl records. In addition to her work as an artist, Combo has curated music and sound art projects at Lisbon’s Teatro do Bairro Alto, and since 2013 she has been researching the archive of songs on work in rural Portugal compiled by ethnomusicologist Michel Giacometti. Some of these songs are included in her pieces through processes of re-appropriation, sampling and reinterpretation.
R. Vincenzo 8:30pm
A self-dubbed “sample samurai”, Ricardo Vincenzo is an artist from São Paulo whose practice involves editing and mixing, in real time, fragments of tracks from a broad array of regions and folklore. The result is a kind of collage, a syncretic ‘mash-up’ where the organic melds with the electronic, and where constituent elements are resignified and transformed. Vincenzo is a member of two other renowned São Paulo initiatives, the group Roda da Sample and the collective Voodoohop.
Lechuga Zafiro 9:30pm
Pablo de Vargas, a musician from Montevideo, explores experimental music through a vindication of popular elements, with his music the outcome of an early fascination with such widely diverse genres as cumbia, kuduro, tribal guarachero and particularly candombe percussion, an Afro-Uruguayan tradition he also explores as a member of the group F5. Under the name Lechuga Zafiro his tracks have also been championed by figures such as Matías Aguayo, Errorsmith, Kode 9 and Burial. In Archipelago his contribution promises a session of Latin-rooted, mutating and futuristic rhythms.
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Saturday, 21 September
Program Saturday
Museo Reina Sofía
Retiro Park, Palacio de Cristal
Udlot Udlot by José Maceda 1pm
Udlot Udlot, presented in the Palacio de Cristal — built in 1887 to house the General Exhibition on the Philippine Islands — sets out to consider colonial exploitation on these islands. Composer and musicologist José Maceda (1917–2004) studied music from east and west Africa, Brazil and Southeast Asia. In Paris he met European composers like Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis and studied ethnomusicology in the United States. In the 1990s he founded the UP Center for Ethnomusicology and wrote a number of books, including Gongs & Bamboos, an approach to Philippine musical instruments.
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400 Hall
Psicolabio 3pm
Miguel Ángel del Ser is a record collector who lives in Madrid. Between December 2017 and October 2018 he produced a series of DJ sessions under the name Psicolabio for Svala Radio. These sessions, characterised by the domestic exoticism of the wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosities), were recognisable for their tone, broad-ranging styles and thematic arrangement.
Chulapeiras 5pm
A group of Madrid-based tambourine players. Their repertoire, compiled by Xurxo Fernandes, is made up of Galician songs and Sephardic songs from Turkey and Greece, some of which represent the final links of oral lore from the villages and towns where they were recorded. These songs bind and accompany dance in impromptu gatherings.
Żywizna (Raphael Rogiński + Genowefa Lenarcik) 5:30pm
Led by his interest in ethnomusicology, guitarist Raphael Rogiński moves to and from different coordinates, from jazz to blues to Jewish music. The focus of his group Żywizna, alongside vocalist Genowefa Lenarcik, is musical tradition from the Polish region of Kurpie — Żywizna means “nature” in the dialect from this area, Genowefa’s birthplace and the place where her father, Stanisław Brzozowy, was a true institution of local folk music. In this project, the musical legacy of Kurpie collides with Rogiński’s electric guitar, taking these songs to new places.
Lea Bertucci 6:15pm
An American composer, performer and sound designer who works in the field of electroacoustic music, inside the minimalist tradition of Julius Eastman, Éliane Radigue and La Monte Young, but without overlooking music recorded in Burundi, Finland, Bulgaria and Ethiopia. Her concerts for alto sax engage specifically with their surroundings via extended techniques and psychoacoustic feedback. For instance, her 2019 record Resonant Field was conceived to experiment with the resonances of the inside of an abandoned grain silo; that is, a huge concrete cylinder which is part of the Silo City industrial complex in Buffalo, New York.
Kolida Babo 7pm
Koliada is the Slavic name for the celebration of the new solar year, known in other parts of Europe as the winter solstice or Christmas. Greek artists Socratis Votskos and Harris P adopted the name Kolida Babo for their collaboration when they began to record their first record around this time of year. Both play the duduk, a woodwind instrument originating from Armenia and popularised by Djivan Gasparyan, one of the group’s primary influences, together with spiritual free jazz, kosmische electronic music and traditional music from the Greek regions of Epirus and Thrace.
Asmâa Hamzaoui y Bnat Timbouktou 7:45pm
Artist Asmâa Hamzaoui, daughter of maâlem or the master Rachid Hamzaoui, plays the guembri, a kind of three-string bass, accompanied by Bnat Timbouktou (Daughters of Timbuktu), krakebs and castanets. The set-up constitutes one of the few all-female Moroccan Gnawa groups. Like diwan or bilali (Algeria), stambali (Tunisia), and sambali (Fezzan, Libya), gnawa music originates from the brotherhoods of the slaves who practiced possession rites and the members of which maintain they descend from Bilal, the first Abyssinian (Ethiopian) converted to Islam.
Bamba Pana & Makaveli 8:30pm
A collaboration made up of Bamba Pana, a producer, and rapper Makaveli, which is one of the finest exponents of singeli, a music movement that caused a stir among youths from the Dar es Salaam neighbourhoods (Tanzania), with the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes catapulting them on to the world stage. Drawing influences from autochthonous genres such as taarab, mchiriku and bongo flava, Tanzanian hip-hop, this duo’s music is played at dizzying speed, faster than Gabber — exceeding 180 bpm – leaving those who venture to dance exhausted.
Held on 18 Sep 2019
For the third year running, the programme Archipelago encourages an understanding of the complexity of the contemporary world through listening, exploring what is understood by experimental music and the relation it bears to popular culture by way of different narratives and geographies.
The present edition explores the concept of tradition: a term predominantly associated with conservatism and regression in the face of change, but with a meaning that implies the transfer of knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next. Thus, it can be recognised more as a way to advance and reconcile and not solely as a skewed attempt to preserve a kind of mythicised originality.
Thus, Archipelago contemplates tradition as a set of shared knowledge, affection and practices specific to contexts, times and groups, and through this prism the programme offers an approach to different artists working with genres which on the surface appear unrelated – (gnawa, noise, singeli, electroacoustic and dance music genres that subvert any attempt at classification) or which, despite their supposed newness, are remotely associated with some form of musical tradition. In essence, the programme backs a celebration of listening as a kind of double gaze at the past – distant or recent — and, more importantly, towards an unpredictable future.
With the support of
Goethe-Institut Madrid, the Philippine Embassy in Spain, the Spanish Embassy in the Philippines, and the UP Center for Ethnomusicology
With the technical support of
The Centre of Performance Technology (CTE), the National Institute of Performance Arts and Music (INAEM) and the Municipal School of Music and Dance, Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera
Curatorship
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Education programme Udlot Udlot
Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Cristina Gutiérrez and Jesús Jara
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
With the sponsorship of
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Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down.
Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.
In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.
In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.
Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.
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.