The Museo Reina Sofía contributes, once again, to the annual contemporary art fair ARCOmadrid — which focuses this year on the Amazon — by virtue of the programme Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism. On this occasion, the Museo hosts two different events conducted by two artists who symbolise its present day and emergence: a performance by trans-Indigenous artist Uýra Sodoma and a DJ set by Uruguayan sound artist Pablo de Vargas, who also works under the moniker Lechuga Zafiro.
According to the cosmogeny of Indigenous peoples from Alto Río Negro (Amazonas), Wametisé, meaning “named places”, references the time when humanity was assigned each territory. Drawing inspiration from this idea, Amazofuturism explores identities and narratives which challenge Western art models, constituting a new form of creation and representation which demonstrates a hybrid existence between the human, the vegetative, the physical and the metaphysical.
Observable within the context of contemporary art is a mounting interest in Indigenous people’s thinking and ways of life, and, in this case, in the Amazonia region identity is underpinned by a collective future and the artistic practices which evolve are, more plurally, forms of resistance and healing that set forth a more sustainable relationship with nature.
Collaboration
Museo Reina Sofía
Organised by
ARCOmadrid / IFEMA MADRID
Sponsor
Agenda
viernes 07 mar 2025 a las 18:00
The Reina with ARCOmadrid. Performance by Uýra Sodoma
Within the Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism programme, curated by María Wills and Denilson Baniwa
Uýra Sodoma presents her performance inside the framework of the Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism programme. This diasporic Indigenous artist uses her body as a support to narrate stories through photorealism, performance and installations, in this instance inviting the audience to participate and interact in the performance.
viernes 07 mar 2025 a las 21:30
Reina Party with ARCOmadrid. DJ Set by Lechuga Zafiro
Within the Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism programme, curated by Magui Dávila
In the construction of this DJ set, Uruguayan sound artist Pablo de Vargas, who also performs under the moniker Lechuga Zafiro, seeks to convey the nuances of the Latin American experience through his music, combining the exploratory nature of dance culture and poetry in sound design. His sets move, with intricacy and energy, between funk and techno, as well as his own productions.
Participants
Uýra Sodoma is a diasporic Indigenous person, two sprits (transvestite) and an inhabitant of Manaus (Amazonas, Brazil), an industrial area amid the forest where she works as an educator with traditional communities. A biologist with an MA in Amazonian Ecology and a visual artist, Uýra uses her body as a support to narrate stories via photorealism, performance and installations. She has participated in over fifty collective exhibitions, both national and international, including at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the Currier Museum of Art (USA). She has also displayed her work at biennials such as the São Paulo Biennial (Brazil), the Manifesta! Biennial (Kosovo), the 13th São Paulo Architecture Biennial and the 1st Bienal das Amazônias (Brazil), and has received numerous awards, for instance the EDP Award in the Arts (Instituto Tomie Ohtake), the PIPA Prize (2022), the SIM Award for Racial Equality (2023) and the Art Rio FOCO Prize (2023).
Lechuga Zafiro is Pablo de Vargas, a sound artist from Uruguay. His work fuses an interest in experimental music and southern-hemisphere rhythms, and, influenced by the percussion of candombe — Afro-Uruguayan culture — Mexican tribal music and the Angolan rhythms of kuduro, Zafiro came to the attention of dancers and musicians with his debut track “Sapo de Manga”, released in 2013 on Cómeme, followed by the EPs "Aequs Nyama" and "Testigo”. In 2024, he released his first album on the Colombian imprint TraTraTrax. In addition to producing, Zafiro is a DJ who moves, ironically, between different music genres.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.