Held on 10 Dec 2021
Archipelago once again makes its yearly return, inviting audiences to explore the complexity of the contemporary world through listening. In this particular edition, it looks to delve into the discourse of modernity in experimental music, its unrecognised roots and the history, politics and ideologies that govern our tastes.
This fifth edition, staying true to its identity, offers three events. The interest in shining a light on the local scene takes shape with the presence of Atomizador and his approach to psychodelia from instrumentation characterising old Western music. Marta De Pascalis, a Berlin-based composer from Rome, explores the complex ramifications of contemporary electronic music through the filter of southern European tradition, while non-hegemonic rhythmic innovations — one of the series’ core areas of interest — find a space in the session of De Schuurman, a key figure in the evolution of bubbling, a music genre originating from Afro-Dutch postcolonial diaspora and highly influential, despite its limited exposure. [dropdown]
In its early editions, Archipelago focused on reminding us how supposedly innovative aspects of modern Anglo-European music submerged roots stretching beyond the confines of geography and culture. Moreover, in 2020 the music industry was hit with major challenges. The restriction to people’s free movement and imposed social distancing fired a warning shot of the fragility underpinning many music communities. In response, last year’s edition backed in-person involvement and the immersive experience of sound amid uncertainty and selective confinements and, following health measures, vehemently opposed streaming, a format attempting to establish itself as the main channel through which to ingest music. Individual listening can be a pleasurable experience, yes, but this series would rather embrace a more physical dimension and shared intimacy.
The threat of a new, and even harsher, economic recession in this cycle of global crises is beginning to manifest itself and should not be dismissed. Many people are still reeling from previous onslaughts, while others will be susceptible to what is around the corner. Despite state aid and the injection of recovery funds, public-sector culture, education and health still unquestionably lack the resources they deserve. For all that, Archipelago is (and aspires to continue being) a public service which works meticulously to offer an enjoyable way of discovering and becoming familiar with musical structures, and their history, political determinants and material conditions.
That said, not only public structures have been affected. The so-called music industry is showing signs of abrasion, even among its alternative and minority circles. Over the past five years, Archipelago has been lucky enough to come into contact with a rich network of selfless agents and promoters, festivals financed through public funds and private sponsorship, touring artists, self-managed labels, agencies with offices in Europe that enable the circulation of artists from countries for which our borders make entry difficult, independent radio websites, close-to-extinction specialised critique, venues and clubs with bold line-ups, cultural associations, nationally and European funded projects which support medium- and long-term projects. This hive, as populated as it is fragile, has been significantly impacted by the 2021 supply crisis which, far from being irreparable, incisively points to the systemic problems with the mass consumption of music and, therefore, to the idea that it can only be understood as a commodity. The crisis in the supply chains caused by bottlenecks in ports around the world and the closure of factories in south-east Asia has reduced the supply of approximately 8,000 tons of plastic and polyvinyl chloride used to manufacture albums from a record industry at a low ebb and which, thirty years ago, produced five times the amount of plastic with the rise of the cassette. In the meantime, digital supports are also still being affected by a crisis in the supply of chips for computers and mobile phones which play streamed music. Supports manufactured with sought-after minerals enabling the mass flow of music in data format, everywhere and at all times. This digital revolution — only in terms of music streaming — requires energy sources, such as gas and carbon, that produce between 250 and 300 million kilos of greenhouse gases per year.
There can be no doubt that we find ourselves before collapse. A contradictory situation in which music seems, at times, one of the few forms with which to move beyond the bedlam stemming from its own commercial circulation. Yet far from thinking about this situation as a monumental paralysis, the word collapse works here in the sense of downfall and ruin — the fact that the last album by Marta De Pascalis is called Sonus Ruinae places it in the spirit of our times.
Despite the dystopia that has become entrenched in the present, this text does not seek to send out an apocalyptic message. Instead, it wishes to pay attention to change. A collapse is never the end times, but rather something that can put our well-being, links and affections with other humans to the test; in short, the material conditions of our life and, therefore, our music. This slow-motion collapse pushes us forward, beyond the speculative self-absorption of the future and the “next big things”, commonplace in the world of art and culture. This event offers three concerts and is an invitation to listen together to offer encouragement and excitement to survive a day, and to face the next one. The day after tomorrow? We’ll deal with that when it comes around. [/dropdown]
Programme
7pm Atomizador
Atomizador is synonymous with a passion for free music, above and beyond labels. A tireless agitator in Madrid’s underground scene, a graphic artist with expressionist and obsessive traits, inspired by figures from outsider art like Nick Blinko and Austin Osman Spare, and a staunch advocate of DIY as a life philosophy. He has created various miniature collections of expansive music, among them Hallucinosis (2018) and, particularly … y qué es exactamente un sueño… (2020), the latter of which sees his sound palette opening out to instruments such as the baroque lute and Renaissance vihuela. Both albums mentioned, released by Afeite al perro and Discos Alehop!, are the latest instalments from a discography which works to reinterpret psychodelia in the least predictable way possible. A career which, in recent times, has sought to make the echoes of old European music co-exist in the same universe as the harmonies of the Beach Boys and Vainica Doble, non-Western polyphonic vocals, glossolalia, the energy of African-American freeform jazz, the least dogmatic hardcore punk and even Japanese noise.
8pm Marta De Pascalis
Marta De Pascalis works with synthesis in both analogue and digital supports, expressively incorporating magnetic tape loops to create repetitions and complex textures, in line with the American minimalist tradition of artists like Terry Riley. De Pascalis unfurls an updated version of this compositional avenue, while also reflecting on the legacy of pioneers from the Italian soundscape, such as Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and the more experimental side of Franco Battiato. Her third album, Sonus Ruinae (Morphine Records, 2020), is a record which looks at the future as something uncertain, and through these magnetic tape loops she overlays and cyclically develops layers which progressively fall away. This palimpsest transforms gradually to create a kind of “sound ruin”, as the artist puts it.
9pm De Schuurman
The family of Guillermo Schuurman, born in The Hague, has always been a family of music lovers and DJs, for instance his uncle DJ Chippie, considered, along with DJ Moortje, the figures responsible for putting bubbling on the map. Bubbling is a genre normally associated with communities of Afro-Dutch post-colonial diaspora in the regions of Curazao, Aruba and Surinam and, according to scholars such as Wayne Marshall, it came into being in the 1980s when Moortje accidentally played a dancehall record at 45 rpm, instead of 33, to the euphoria of the people dancing and later a whole music scene that would work on reformulating Jamaican sounds in a fresh and innovative way. In the middle years between the two decades of the 2000s, a teenage De Schuurman became one of the purveyors of bubbling, uncoiling it to other urban genres and electronic sounds more typical of house productions. More recently, the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes, hailed for its global dissemination of local genres such as Tanzanian Singeli (present in the 2019 Archipelago), has dug up some of De Schuurman’s most emblematic tracks in the anthology Bubbling Inside (2021), one of the few phonographic documents of a genre and music scene which would have seldom transcended the borders of The Hague and Rotterdam, but the influence of which in the development of recent dance music is worthy of review.
Curators
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
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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.