Archipielago 2020
Held on 18 Sep 2020
For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies. The present edition continues to conduct research into that popular repertory as a form transmitting knowledge, questioning the globalising principles associated with notions such as experimentation and avant-garde.
Mix, transmission and mutation are terms which, musically, can have a positive meaning, and are aspects this concert series has always embraced. Yet today these words have become imbued with a negative connotation, reflecting the shift towards the hermeticism of nation states and their borders: How will contemporary music genres be affected? What about the different sound communities scattered around the world? To what degree will it impact the practices of an entire generation of musicians? And the live music experience? How will local aspects be re-signified in this new setting? How will networks be re-built in a world where the freedom of movement and contact of bodies are limited?
In dealing with these enquiries, the latest edition of Archipelago assumes a novel format: all acts will take place outdoors in the Sabatini Building Garden via a quadrophonic arrangement of sound, placing the stress on the physicality of sound and offering DJ-led listening sessions, whilst drawing inspiration from the experience of diaspora. Concerts which look to reinvent popular culture and speculate on what is in store and on constructing in a particularly unpredictable future.
Programme
Friday, 18 September – from 7pm to 9pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
7pm - Cher-ee-lee
Cher-ee-lee is the moniker Jerilyn Gonçalves uses for her sessions and podcasts, some of which have featured on digital platforms such as Radio Relativa and KRAAK. Of note is her radio show Música para Camaleones (Music for Chameleons), in which she traces the plurality of directions taken by Venezuela’s sound heritage, within and beyond its borders, with the project leading Gonçalves to study her country’s music with the aim of, as she puts it, “building a home away from home”. Cher-ee-lee is a native from Caracas who had to move to Madrid, integrating into the community of Venezuelan expatriates settled in Spain, the largest in Europe. For Archipelago she leads a session around the captivating musical syncretism of Venezuela and its subsequent influence on manifestations of contemporary experimentation. In short, an invitation to discover an uncommon narrative on Venezuela’s fertile culture and history.
8pm - Jessica Ekomane
Rhythm, tone, time and space are probably the four variables that define the compositions of this French artist, residing in Berlin, who is a great admirer of Györgi Ligeti and Maryanne Amacher. In Archipelago, she performs a concert which, through the use of a quadrophonic system and the immersive nature of her sonic landscapes, seeks to trigger a cathartic effect among the audience as she employs her experience of making installations in which psychoacoustics are at the core. Ekomane’s pieces, moreover, depart from an investigation into the relationships between individual perception and collective dynamics, between listening and its social determinants. Multivocal (2019), her debut album, aptly demonstrates her rigorous aesthetics and working methodology — seemingly static, but ever-changing, to the point of inducing a kind of trance in the listener.
Saturday, 19 September – from 1pm to 2pm
Doors open at 12:30pm
1pm - Lucrecia Dalt
In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.
Saturday, 19 September – from 6pm to 9pm
Doors open at 5:30pm
6pm - Jokkoo (Baba Sy & Mbodj)
The Jokkoo collective came into being in Barcelona in 2017 to disseminate music and sound narratives from the African continent and its diasporas. Despite a markedly electronic identity, their sounds did not find a place on the dance floors of the Catalan city. Thus, Baba Sy and Mbodj (Maguette Dieng) — joined by Opoku, Mookie and B4mba over the past year — decided to bring this musical ebullience to the fore at parties, events and a programme on the radio station Dublab, with reference points most notably including genres which, with a cosmic and futurist spirit, seek to transform the analysis of the past and foreground the present. This guided listening session focuses on the inheritance and echoes of the black Atlantic, a sound journey that is also an account of certain histories that closely run through this duo.
7pm - Tarta Relena
Tarta Relena is a Catalan duo, made up of Marta Torrella (contralto) and Helena Ros (soprano), that explores, a cappella, the sonorities of different oral tradition music and singer-songwriters related to the Mediterranean. Both came into contact with polyphony via choral music, leading them to explore renaissance and baroque repertoires, in addition to their background in musicology (Marta) and linguistics (Helena), which goes some way towards explaining their performances of ancient Sephardic, Greek, Corsican and Menorcan songs. Whilst respecting tradition, their aim is not to perpetuate it and both are quick to avoid any glimmer of purism — thus, they accept with humour the tag “progressive Gregorian” in defining their music. For Archipelago they put forward a concert that reflects the achievements of their outstanding debut, Ora pro nobis (2019), and more recently Intercede pro nobis (2020), a work which welcomes the introduction of subtle electronic arrangements.
8pm - Lucrecia Dalt
In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.
With the sponsorship of:
Curators:
Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo
Collaboration:
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsorship:
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
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.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.