Held on 16, 17 Jun 2023
In May 2022, a few weeks before that year’s edition of Archipelago, it was overcast in Arenas Blancas, a small beach in the municipality of Frontera on the island of El Hierro. At the foot of entirely black volcanic mountains, fine white sand stretches eastwards, blown in the opposite direction to the wind and carried up to that point. In this tiny corner of the island, trade winds do not collide against the mountainous mass but fly over it, depositing white sand from the Sahara. On the side of these black peaks is the village of Sabinosa, one of many on El Hierro that celebrates the traditional dance of Virgen de los Reyes, its rhythm linking directly with research carried out by the curators of Archipelago between 2018 and 2023, and which in this edition closes with the hope of new perspectives.
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According to some who participate in the dance of the Virgen de los Reyes, its rhythms emanate from the pre-Hispanic legacy of the Berbers and Bimbaches. Thus, El Hierro is perhaps the most westerly land musical mutation has reached, stretching from North Africa and influenced by instruments that came from the Silk Road. Archipelago has covered this east-to-west journey through concerts organised since 2018 — also ordered from east to west — and performed by Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Iran), Saba Alizadeh (Iran), Mazaher (Egypt), Nadah El Shazly (Egypt), Ammar 808 (Tunisia) and Asmâa Hamzaoui and Bnat Timbouktou (Morocco). As an endpoint to this research, the rhythms of El Hierro distil the discourse of Archipelago: underscoring alternative music genres and modes of listening with respect to cultural centres in Europe and the USA, demonstrating how the geography of music differs to the political geography we are customarily shown.
El Hierro is not any volcanic island. For centuries, it was considered prime meridian before being replaced by Greenwich Mean Time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. This occurred after the United Kingdom had standardised the measurement of time for the rest of the planet in 1840 via the Great Western Railway company. El Hierro, sitting halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents Western media’s powerful grid, which rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.
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Friday, 16 June 2023 - 7pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Presentation
—By Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
The researchers and curators of Archipelago present here the theoretical, geopolitical, historical, musical and ideological notions they have used to thread the narrative of El Hierro Will Once Again Be the Centre of the World. Since 2018, concerts have combined with research on the importance of tradition as a way to transmit knowledge that is living and not part of an immobile past. This exploration started by questioning the concept of musical experimentation from a vast array of geographies, eras, genealogies, genres and narratives, but in 2022 evolved towards more material-based aspects and set forth an analysis around sea currents, winds and trade routes to understand musical mutations in different parts of the world. In this analysis of currents and winds, trade winds took up a prominent place, those winds that blow from east to west at sea level, swaying and rocking the boats of looters and slave traders sailing to the Americas. It was no accident that El Hierro was chosen by Christopher Columbus to embark on his second voyage to the Americas in 1493, for in his first journey he had discovered, somewhat fortuitously, this wind current. Hence the reason why the connection between El Hierro and Venezuela is so palpable today in the identity of this Canary Island archipelago.
Friday, 16 June 2023 - 7:30pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado: Eles transportan a morte
After devoting space to audiovisual works in 2022, the 2023 edition of Archipelago screens Eles transportan a morte (2021), a film written and directed by Santiago de Compostela native Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado from Tenerife. The film starts with Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio’s song A contratiempo (Carabelas de Colón), an example of how sound design becomes an indivisible narrative and sculptural element in its mise en scène. Girón and Delgado worked with Colombians Camilo Sanabria, who composed the film’s score, and Carlos E. García, a distinguished sound designer of works such as El abrazo de la serpiente (2015), by Ciro Guerra, and Mauro Colombo’s Tierra adentro (2019), where the presence of sounds from the primary rainforest dividing Panama and Colombia recalls the laurel forests of Tenerife. It is set in 1492, a year that marks the start of Western domination and is still celebrated today as the discovery of the “New World”. However, the film also looks at Columbus’s journey from a different angle, with citations of art and cinephilia which speak of death, suicide and mourning as a geological and magical element connected by magma, as explored by the duo of film-makers in Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego (2016). Athanasius Kircher, Ana Mendieta and Sam Peckinpah are some of the lodestars offered by this account to observe and listen to the voyage of caravels from a more unusual place.
Saturday, 17 June 2023 - 7pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
A Folkloric Ensemble from Sabinosa
The story goes that in 1546 a boat, on its journey towards the Americas, was between the tip of La Restinga and the Orchilla Lighthouse, an area on the southern coast of El Hierro called Mar de las Calmas (Calm Sea) where boats sought shelter from the blowing trade winds on the hillsides of El Julan. When the food on board ended, the shepherds would go down to the coast to offer supplies to the crew, reciprocated with a carving of the Virgin Mary. According to this tale, the exchange caused the winds to change and the boat could set sail westwards, leaving the island behind. The shepherds kept the sculpture in a cave and from 1643, when the end of a drought was proclaimed, the custom of celebrating the Descent of the Virgin began, a commemoration in which dancers took the carving on a route through different towns, accompanied by songs for whistles, flutes, local castanets and drums, setting a syncopated rhythm which preserved the legacy of the Bimbaches and Berbers who inhabited the island before it was invaded by the Kingdom of Castile.
Saturday, 17 June 2023 - 8pm / Sabatini Building, southwest Stairway
Tenores di Bitti "Mialinu Pira"
Canto a tenore is a type of polyphonic singing in the pastoral culture of Sardinia. Groups are structured around four voices: bassu (bass), contra (counter), boche (solo voice) and mesu boche (half voice). Gathered in a circle, the singers modulate the deep and guttural timbre of the bass (bassu) and the counter (contra). According to Polish ethno-musicologist Bożena Muszkalska, in Sardinia the canto a tenore is thought to connect shepherds, flocks and mountains and, therefore, the solo voice (boche) is comparable to the voice of the shepherd as he speaks to his animals, while the choir is responsible for creating the non-human replica. Further, the tenors sometimes use the echo of caves and rock formations to make their song more immersive.During this edition of Archipelago, the Sardinian ensemble Tenores di Bitti "Mialinu Pira", which has been active since 1995 and comprised of Omar Bandinu, Bachisio Pira, Arcangelo Pittudu y Marco Serra, attempts to recreate this resonance on the granite stairway located in the south-east part of the Sabatini Building. Declared Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2004, the canto a tenore is deemed vulnerable because of the decline of pastoral culture and the rise of tourism in Sardinia, sparking transformations in the diversity of its repertoire.
Saturday, 17 June 2023 - 8:30pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
DJ Travella
DJ Travella is a musician and producer from Dar es-Salam, the largest city in Tanzania — a country where almost half the population are teenagers. The demographic growth forecast for Dar es-Salam estimates it will become one of the three most populated cities on the planet by the end of this century and it is already one of the nerve centres of today’s geopolitical landscape. Currently, the city, the former capital of Tanzania, is home to one of the ports built by the China Harbour Engineering Company, and the place from which this superpower extracts minerals such as lithium, used in the manufacturing of batteries which could be a sustainable alternative to other energy sources without reducing global consumption. DJ Travella belongs to the so-called Generation Z and is an exponent of the new wave of Tanzanian producers who have managed to take singeli, a distinctly local genre, to the international circuit of electronic dance music and, in so doing, open it up to other influences which are more representative of urban sound in the West. Singeli, synonymous with speed and jubilation, draws from genres such as taarab, mchiriku, bongo flava and sebene, and was present back in the 2019 edition of Archipelago via Bamba Pana (responsible for the famous Pamoja Studios) and rapper Makaveli.
Saturday, 17 June 2023 - 9:15pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
DJ Diaki
Dj Diaki is the moniker of Diaki Kone from Mali. He continues, with DJ Sandji, along the way paved by Seydou Bagayoko, a pioneer of balani show, a genre widely embraced since the 1990s by young people from enclaves such as Bamako (Mali). Due to its waning popularity in the city, balani show gained traction at parties organised with sound systems in rural areas. Balani means “little dance” in reference to the balafon, a tuned melodic percussion instrument from West Africa which is at the heart of ceremonies and social events. Its rhythmic structures are key in this type of music, where elements from coupé-décalé and soukous coalesce. With DJ Diaki at the controls, balani show becomes, in his own words, balani fou (“crazy balani” in French), because the tempo is pitched up to 190-200 BPM, triggering a dialogue with another dizzying genre, Tanzanian singeli. Today’s Bali and Tanzania are connected by a route which has crossed the Sahara since the Iron Age 4,000 years ago, when Bantu migration spread across the continent from South Africa to Mali, Kenia and Tanzania.
Saturday, 17 June 2023 - 10:00pm / Sabatini Building, Garden
DJ Diaki + DJ Travella
To see out this edition of Archipelago, two ambassadors of balani show and singeli, two music genres which have shaken up the most unprejudiced dance floors around the world, will perform together. With Veteran DJ Diaki and the prominent figure of DJ Travella, this special collaboration serves to show how we stand not before a passing phase, but a contemporary sound in full force. The three DJ sessions feature a device with speakers which will turn the Sabatini Garden into an immersive space for dance.
Curators
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsor
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Esther Villar Gutiérrez for taking Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo to Arenas Blancas in Frontera, El Hierro
Inside the framework of
TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies
Sponsor
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8 October 2025 – 24 June 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.
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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.
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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.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
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Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
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Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the Mapfre Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.