Trailer by the Ever Given ship jammed on the Suez Canal, Middle East Eye, 29 March 2021
Date and time
Held on 16 sep 2017
Archipiélago is a concert series and research project that unfolded in the Museo Reina Sofía from 2017 to 2023 with the aim of questioning the universality of the term “experimentation” within the sphere of Western music. The term, which originated as a concept in the USA, has been replicated to the extent that it has created a canon and even a genre. Across its different editions, the series brought together different musicians, performers and researchers from around the world in an attempt to rethink other forms of experimentation beyond the frameworks of hegemonic thought. In collaboration with music groups and artists from different geographical areas, Archipelago approached this concept of “experimentation” from different perspectives.
Following a first edition in 2017, in which pioneering figures of minimalism encountered music and genres from non-European zones and new generations of artists, in 2018 it sought to resituate and question the term “experimental” with texts hailing from Central and South America and the Middle East, where the idea of experimentation as an avant-garde rupture lacks meaning opposite that of tradition as a living form of knowledge constantly mutating and spreading. Thus, in 2019 the programme introduced the act of listening to sound compositions and experimentations without applying any historical or geographical order, letting, by contrast, connections materialize between heterogenous languages and contexts. Despite the difficult circumstances brought about by COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, a decision was made to back the physicality of live music and, therefore, strengthen local fabrics. In 2022, the project embarked upon a deep-time study of certain musical mutations that had not been addressed to an adequate degree from the previously investigated English-speaking narrative. Through a study of ocean currents, winds, trade routes and submarine cabling, a themed journey was put forward, one in which there is little to no difference between experimentation and tradition. Finally, for the closing edition in 2023, Archipelago set forth an account of fictional archaeology to re-consider the discourse of Western modernity by listening to an “impossible past” from which to imagine other futures for music.
Curators
Rubén Coll y José Luis Espejo
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Sponsor
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September 16, 23 and 30, 2017 Sabatini Building
Archipelago 2017
Concert series
This first edition of Archipelago was enveloped in drone music and minimalism, exploring its influences and unexpected offshoots. The programme included key figures of experimentalism such as the French composer Éliane Radigue and the New York-based Japanese sound artist Yoshi Wada — both linked to minimalism and Fluxus, respectively. These “pioneering” figures were also joined by younger artists who, despite sharing certain compositional roots with Eastern music, adopt different formal approaches. For this particular edition, the artists presented commissioned and unreleased works, with the exception of Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la mort (Trilogy of Death), performed in its entirety by Emmanuel Holterbach for the first time in Spain.
Participants: Severine Beata and Javi Álvarez, Emmanuel Holterbach, iNSANLAR, Agnès Pe, Damián Schwartz, and Yoshi and Tashi Wada
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Friday 21 and Saturday 22 September, 2018 (check programme) / Sabatini Building, Vaults Gallery, Garden and Auditorium, and Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, Manuel de Falla Auditorium
Archipelago 2018
Concert series
In its second edition, Archipelago reasserted its intention to present listening as a form of both knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. This edition saw Rubén Coll join the curatorial project, which set forth more comprehensive research into the feeling of exhaustion that can be perceived in the West’s experimental scene, whereby the relationship between formal rupture and progress often proves unconvincing. The participating artists questioned the universality of experimentation precisely as it had been expounded in some of Europe’s and the USA’s major cities, often looking to vindicate the non-Western roots of their music.
Participants: AMMAR 808, Clara de Asís, DJ LAG, Errorsmith, Cedrick Fermont, Hashigakari, Áine O’Dwyer, Janneke van der Putten, Nadah El Shazly, Tarawangsawelas & Rabih Beaini, Toukadime and TUTU.
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From 18 to 21 September 2019 Museo Reina Sofía (Sabatini Building, Vaults Gallery, Auditorium, Nouvel Building Auditorium, 400 Hall and Palacio de Cristal); Iglesia de San Millán y San Cayetano; Municipal School of Music and Dance, Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera
Archipelago 2019
Concert Series
The 2019 edition explored the concept of tradition: a term associated with conservatism and regression in the face of change, but with a meaning that implies the transfer of knowledge from one person to another, from one generation to the next. Thus, the programme featured not only artists that experiment with non-Western roots, but also shone a light on noise, singeli and dance music, genres which subvert any attempt at classification via traditional forms such as electroacoustic, gnawa and traditional Kurpie music, as well as music from the nearby Madrid mountain range and the Galician bagpipes.
Participants: Saba Alizadeh, Asmâa, Kolida Babo, Rashad Becker, Lea Bertucci, Chulapeiras, Hamzaoui and Bnat Timbouktou, Gaba, Nina García, Ipek Gorgun, Miguel Nava and Rafa Martín, Bamba Pana & Makaveli, Psicolabio, Síria, R. Vincenzo, Lechuga Zafiro and Żywizna (Raphael Rogiński + Genowefa Lenarcik).
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Friday, 18 and Saturday, 19 September 2020 (check programme) Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Archipelago 2020
Concert series
Organised at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this edition of Archipelago adopted an unusual format: all performances took place in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400 with a quadrophonic arrangement of sound. Placing the stress on the physicality of sound and physical presence opposite streaming, DJ-led listening sessions were put forward and drew inspiration from the experience of diaspora, in addition to concerts that sought to reinvent the popular and speculate on what will come and be built in a highly unpredictable future.
Participants: Cher-ee-lee, Lucrecia Dalt and Jokkoo (Baba Sy & Mbodj), Jessica Ekomane and Tarta Relena.
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December 2021 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400, Lobby
Archipelago 2021
Concert Series
TicketsThis fifth edition tackled the complexity of the post-traumatic effects of lockdown and crisis, responding to this situation by focusing on the local scene, realised with Atomizador and his approach to psychodelia from the instrumentation that characterises historical Western music. Marta De Pascalis, a Berlin-based composer from Rome, explored the complex ramifications of contemporary electronic music through the filter of southern European tradition, while non-hegemonic rhythmic innovations — one of the festival’s core areas of interest — found 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.
Participants: Atomizador, Marta De Pascalis and De Schuurman
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Saturday, 18 June 2022 Sabatini Building, Auditorium and Garden
Archipelago 2022
The Material Conditions of Our Music
TicketsStarting from the image of the ship Ever Given stranded on the Suez Canal in 2021, the sixth edition of Archipelago reflected on the material questions that influence music, for instance the transportation of raw materials and goods and the importance of ports, colonial routes and ocean currents, in addition to forced migrations. Through a string of concerts fusing traditional music and experimentation, Archipelago recapitulated, reinterpreted and overhauled learning related to the common history of traditional music to date.
Participants: Erkizia + Cantizano, Edna Martinez, Pujllay Masis, Mazaher and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi.
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Friday, 16 and Saturday, 17 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium, southwest Stairwell and Garden
Archipelago 2023
El Hierro Will Once Again Be the Centre of the World
Tickets (16 June)The 2023 edition brought down the curtain on a theoretical and geopolitical journey through the musical mutations of our times which was set in motion in 2017 by José Luis Espejo and then jointly with Rubén Coll from 2018 onwards. The island of El Hierro, halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, is a metaphor for music that circumvents the Western media’s powerful grid, which in turn rules the taste, presence and even fees of musicians from the experimental scene. In this final edition, El Hierro will once again be the centre of the world.
Participants: The Folkloric Ensemble of Sabinosa, DJ Travella and DJ Diaki, Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, and Tenores di Bitti "Mialinu Pira".
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2017. Severine Beata and Javi Álvarez + iNSANLAR
Watch videoThis series of videos, made by Machines Desirantes Buro, documents the concerts performed in the first edition of Archipelago, in 2017, and is complemented with extensive interviews with the participants. This particular video features the concerts of Severine Beata and Javi Álvarez + iNSANLAR.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2017. Yoshi and Tashi Wada + Damián Schwartz
Watch videoThis series of videos, made by Machines Desirantes Buro, documents the concerts performed in the first edition of Archipelago, in 2017, and is complemented with extensive interviews with the participants. This particular video features the concerts of Yoshi and Tashi Wada + Damián Schwartz.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2017. Éliane Radigue by Emmanuel Holterbach + Agnès Pe
Watch videoThis series of videos, made by Machines Desirantes Buro, documents the concerts performed in the first edition of Archipelago, in 2017, and is complemented with extensive interviews with the participants. This particular video features the concerts of Emmanuel Holterbach and Agnès Pe.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2018
Watch videoThis video, made by Banda Negra, assembles the interventions from the second edition of Archipelago and includes interviews with some of its participants, exploring the possibility of new forms of listening from different twentieth-century sound recordings with a desire to unearth alternatives to the restraints of a canon built from now-exhausted genealogies and narratives.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2019
Watch videoThis video, made by Banda Negra, documents the third edition of Archipelago, exploring the concept of tradition: a term associated with conservatism and regression opposite change, but with a meaning that implies the transfer of knowledge, from one person to another, from one generation to the next.
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Multimedia
Udlot, Udlot by José Maceda
Concert
Watch videoThis video, made by Banda Negra, documents and contextualises the process of mediation, learning and performance of Udlot Udlot (1975), by Philippine composer José Maceda.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2022
The Material Conditions of Our Music
Watch videoThis video, made by Javi Álvarez and Irene de Andrés, reflects the narrative of the 2022 edition of Archipelago. The narration takes us through centuries-old colonial routes for the transportation of goods and cargo, routes which remain today and brought about cultural exchanges that impacted music.
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Multimedia
Archipelago 2023
El Hierro Will Once Again Be the Centre of the World
Watch videoFrom 2018 onwards, the Archipelago concert series invited the audience to delve deeper into the complexity of the contemporary world through listening, seeking to foreground music genres and modes of listening which provide an alternative to European and US cultural centres. This video, made by Javi Alvárez and Irene de Andrés, documents the seventh, and final, instalment of Archipelago, which was centred on El Hierro, a volcanic island which was considered prime meridian for centuries. Located halfway between Africa, Europe and South America, the island is also a metaphor for all music that circumvents the Western media’s powerful grid.
This edition featured the screening of the film Eles transportan a morte (2021), by film-maker’s Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, from Galicia and Tenerife, respectively; a performance by the Folkloric Ensemble of Sabinosa; music by DJ Travella from Tanzania and Malian DJ Diaki; and a concert by the Sardinian ensemble Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”.
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Podcast
Archipelago 2020
How to Listen to Live Music Amid a Pandemic
Listen to podcastThis podcast, written and hosted by Rubén Coll and José Luis Espejo, presents the testimony of artists who participated in the 2020 edition of Archipelago, reflecting on how a cultural event is assembled by considering, for instance, the political and commercial structures that underpin our precarious music communities.
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Pódcast
Archipelago 2021
Concert Series
Listen to podcastThe series shares, for the first time, the recordings of three concerts which comprised the 2021 edition.
![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
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.