A trailer by the Ever Given jammed on the Suez Canal, Middle East Eye, 29 March 2021
Held on 18 Jun 2022
For the sixth year running, the Archipelago concert series invites the public to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening, this time setting out from one of the most remarkable images of 2021: the container ship Ever Given stranded on the Suez Canal. In the image, one of the world’s biggest ships is the backdrop to a trailer harvesting crops. The picture, taken in Egypt, demonstrates the lavish scale of global consumption, bringing two means of transport separated by a supposed technological evolution face to face. Conversely, however, the trailer is not that old and the ship has been following a well-travelled route for thousands of years. It is through this image that the 2022 edition of Archipelago recaps learnings around the common history of tradition and experimentation, adding to this narrative accounts of forced migration, the transportation of raw materials and goods, the importance of ports, colonial routes and ocean currents.
The construction of the Persian Royal Road in the fifth century BC set off a kind of proto-globalisation that radically ground to a halt when the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople in 1453. Given the monopoly of that empire and Venice over materials travelling from China, India and Persia, Europe began its overseas expansion, establishing alternative trade routes. It was at that time that a seafarer, possibly Genoese, rode trade winds through sheer luck and ended up in what is today known as Antilles. Once established in the Caribbean, the Spanish Empire opened a route from the Viceroyalty of New Granada (Cartagena de Indias today) to Seville, but not before passing through Cuba, and, making use of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean, its boats travelled to the European continent.
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In 1565, following the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific Ocean, a route known as the Manila Galleon was established, joining Acapulco and the Philippines via Hawai. The power of a communications network and the sea shipping of materials laid the foundations for modern imperial control, and with it, in parallel, unexpected musical mutations. The trade winds and the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio and Humboldt Currents were and continue to be decisive for health, identity, supplies and shortages.
It is no coincidence that the interoceanic submarine cables that create the internet’s infrastructure coincide with the mapping of British, Spanish and Portuguese imperial routes. Taking advantage of the situation caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic, “platform capitalism” has sought to regulate streaming, promising to “rejuvenate” the music industry as a form of leisure and communication. Yet this “new” data flow transmitted by submarine cables is one further chapter in an ongoing material history of the expansion of imperialist power which, via maritime routes, exploits life, extracts minerals and projects the routes of people’s voluntary and forced migration.
This new edition of Archipelago, therefore, retrieves the image of the Ever Given stuck on the Suez Canal, verifying how modes of current listening are always conditioned by a profound history of currents, routes and musical mutations.
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6pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Presentation
—Conducted by Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
For the first time, the Archipelago curators will present the framework of texts, concepts and documentation they use to structure the festival’s programme by looking at the theoretical reference points from the past five editions of the festival — Habib Hassan Touma, Jean-Claude Éloy, Eugenia Fraga, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Édouard Glissant, among others — along with the recent addition of approaches by Michael Denning and his “archipelago of colonial ports” in Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2020); Jussi Parikka with A Geology of Media (2021); Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (2018); and Kyle Devine’s view on the material cost of music in Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019).
6:20pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Erkizia + Cantizano: O’Gemer, live quadraphonic performance
Xabier Erkizia works from the Basque Country, drawn by a curiosity to any form of communication or creation involving listening and sound. He has co-directed the ERTZ Festival and is a member of the Audiolab Association. Erkizia is a scholar of soundscapes and coordinator of the Soinumapa sound map, and a record label, audiovisual and radio producer. O’Gemer is an experimental film directed by Erkizia and centres on the tuning of the noise made by the axles of ox carts: an ancestral sound and possibly the oldest known sound design in a means of transport; the groan Atahualpa Yupanqui alluded to in one of his Milongas and never wanted to oil. O’Gemer is also a testimony of the journey made by these carts between Europe and Brazil, most likely following the shipping route established by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500 and which, since 2021, has connected Latin America and Europe via the company EllaLink’s fibre optic cables. The event will feature a live spatial version accompanied by Raul Cantizano’s electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy. Raúl Cantizano, for his part, is a guitarist from Seville. On his albums Guitar Surprise. Mito y geología del Canti (2017) and Zona Acordonada (2021) he explores the limits of flamenco, experimentation and improvisation. Moreover, his guitar has served as an accompaniment for Llorenç Barber, Niño de Elche, Juan Carlos Lérida, Belén Maya, Andrés Marín and Rocío Márquez, but for this performance he will draw from an amplified hurdy-gurdy, its hypnotic sound bearing a relation to the sound of ox carts in O’Gemer.
7:30pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi was born in Isfahan two months after the start of the Iranian Revolution. He has lived in Germany for the past two decades, where he has shaped his career as a musician and composer. His approach to the tombak and the daf instruments, after a childhood fascination, transcends traditional playing techniques — the influence of both stretches from Central Asia to the northwest corner of Africa. This longitudinal expansion was connected for thousands of years by the Silk Road, which was paved with the construction of the Persian Royal Road, at the centre of which was today’s Iran. Mortazavi’s focus on music seeks to detach the constrictions inherent in the tombak and daf, as well as national narrative cultures. His approach on albums such as Ritme Jaavdanegi (Latency, 2019) was lauded by the English-speaking music press and in experimental circles, leading him to take part in the thirtieth anniversary of Tresor, Berlin’s legendary techno nightclub and label, as well as participating in festivals such as Berlin Atonal and Rewire. Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s performance in Archipelago is also a chance to encounter the sounds from his most recent album Prisma (Flowfish, 2022).
8:15pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
Pujllay Masis
The first journeys between the Iberian Peninsula and today’s Americas were made by following trade winds. At sea level, these winds blow regularly from east to west, but at an altitude of 6,000 metres there is a trade wind inversion. These winds are at once a meteorological force that rocked the boats of looters and slave traders and the stream that allows planes to travel from the Americas to Europe on the route used by Latin American diaspora. The Pujllay Masis cultural association is a Madrid-based brotherhood of Bolivian origins whose objectives include disseminating Pujllay (which means “game” in Quechua), a set of dance rituals linked to Yampara culture; dances carried out in the rainy season to honour Pachamama, the Andean goddess of fertility, crops and harvest. Equally, they remember an indigenous victory that occurred in 1816 during independence from the Spanish colonies. In 2014, UNESCO declared Pujllay Intangible Cultural Heritage.
8:40pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
Edna Martinez
Edna Martinez is an artist, DJ and curator from Cartagena de Indias who lives in Berlin. Throughout her career, she has focused on spotlighting Caribbean picó, leading her to delve into the roots of popular Colombian music, African rhythms, tropical sounds and even Arabic folklore. These sounds are often the result of the industrialisation of maritime shipping and the framework of contemporary ports and canals, most notably the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Malacca and the Honolulu fuel supply port. For centuries, these have been intersections of geopolitics and global trade. Martinez creates and organises an array of initiatives: Prende la Vela, a celebration of Afro-Latin culture; El Volcán - El Orgullo de Berlín, a night devoted to Colombian soundsystems; and LatinArab, a musical journey from Alexandria to Cartagena de Indias. She also works in radio on Radio Alhara and Worldwide FM.
10:30pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
Mazaher
In 1998, Ahmed El Maghraby formed Mazaher in an attempt to keep the tradition of the Egyptian Zar alive and prevent it from dying out. The Zar originally spread from Ethiopia to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, through the nineteenth-century slave trade, incorporating Sufism elements in Egypt. Ceremonies, officiated by women, initiate the devout by cleaning their spirit through song, dance and polyrhythmic percussion, inducing a trance and driving evil out. The participants inherit the practice of Zar from their mothers and grandmothers. Mazaher sees out the sixth edition of Archipelago, which gets under way with maritime shipping through the Suez Canal, inaugurated in 1869 during the British colonial occupation of Egypt, and ends with the same canal blocked by the Ever Given — the starting point of this programme — in 2021, and also the same canal through which submarine cables pass, following the sea trade routes joining China and Europe for thousands of years, and which stop in each major city in North Africa to enable a data flow listened to as music and, formerly, to transport materials from which instruments and their sounds are made.
Curators
Rubén Coll y José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
Sponsor
Inside the framework of
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Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
LANDSCAPE TRANCE. THE FILMS OF OLIVER LAXE
From 5 to 28 February 2026 – check programme
Over this coming month of February, the Museo organises a complete retrospective on the filmography of Oliver Laxe. The series converses with the work HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, an installation by the Sirāt director conceived specifically for the Museo Reina Sofía’s Espacio 1, and includes the four feature-length films Laxe has made to date, as well as his short films and a four-session carte blanche programme, in which he will select works that chime with his films and creative concerns.
Oliver Laxe’s gaze is one of the most unique in the contemporary film landscape, his film-making a resilient, spiritual and transcultural space imbued with a cultural and social nomadism that reflects his life and beliefs and which, fundamentally, puts forward an anti-materialist ethic to deal with our times. His filmography, characterised by profound spirituality, a time of contemplation and a close connection to nature and the sacred, approaches universal themes such as redemption and the meaning of existence via stories that extend across remote, rural and timeless landscapes, and with atmospheres that draw on western and police film genres. His protagonists, largely amateur actors, cross through physical territories while travelling on inner journeys consumed by guilt, the desire for community reintegration and the realisation of an end goal they ignore. Nature, particularly desert and landscape, is another character, a living, pantheistic presence that conditions and reflects human conflicts. Stretched-out time, a focus on sensory experience and allusions to ancient religion situate us in a meditative conception of film which seeks to be a manifesto to re-enchant the world.
Within the series, the carte blanche sessions see the film-maker choose four films which map his obsessions: Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Highway (1999), which crosses the plains of Kazakhstan via a small travelling circus; Artavazd Peleshyan’s film The Seasons (1975), an ode to the passing of time through landscape; Trás-os-Montes (1976), an ethnographic work of fiction, made by Antònio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, spotlighting a Portuguese farming community and their rituals and purity of life; and Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island, which shows a family of four’s daily struggle in a natural paradise.
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 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.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo
Tuesday, 10 February 2026 – 7pm
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo, Fernando Davis, the show’s curator, and Amanda de la Garza, the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artist director, will converse in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400 on the life and work of the Argentinian artist, a core figure in experimental avant-garde art.
The title of both exhibition and conversation originates from the proclamation “Long Live Arte Vivo” Alberto Greco (Buenos Aires, 1931— Barcelona, 1965) disseminated around the streets and on the walls of Rome. For Greco, arte vivo was an art of the future, an art based on a set of irreverent and untimely gestures, of adventures open to unpredictability melding with life, and which began in 1962, prior to his coining of the term “vivo-dito”. In his Manifiesto dito dell´arte vivo (Dito Arte-Vivo Manifesto), which he pasted on the walls of Genoa, Greco encouraged new contact “with the living elements of our reality: movement, time, people, conversations, smells, rumours, places, situations”. He would also burst into the everyday of Madrid’s streets as he convened a “vivo-dito moment”, culminating in the burning of a canvas painted collectively in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.
In addition to founding arte vivo, Alberto Greco was an informalist painter, a queer flâneur, a poet and sometime actor. This intense journey of Greco’s life and art is closely connected to the migrant route he embarked upon in 1950 in Buenos Aires, taking in Atacama and Humahuaca, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Genoa, Rome, Madrid, Piedralaves, New York and Ibiza and ending abruptly in Barcelona, where he took his own life shortly after writing his final great work, the novel Besos brujos (Bewitching Kisses, 1965).
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
“This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call ‛aestheticide’ — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?”
—T.J. DemosThis seminar takes place thanks to the art historian’s invitation to Spain by the Miró Foundation. In the context of the museum, it engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.