La Chola Poblete, Niño de Elche, Pedro G. Romero and Bouchra Khalili explore different ways of understanding identity, memory and colonial legacies.
The new exhibition season at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, brings together two projects that, through different languages and contexts, share an interest in the ways in which histories, identities and cultures are constructed, circulate and transform.
In Continentes como semillas, La Chola Poblete, Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero examine the relationships between flamenco, colonialism and popular culture through drawing, sculpture, performance and sound. The project questions narratives that place certain cultural practices within fixed boundaries and instead proposes understanding them as the result of movements, exchanges and processes of transformation. The exhibition can be visited until 10 January 2027.
One of the starting points for the exhibition is the Manila shawl, whose history connects China, America, Mexico, the Philippines and Spain. From this object, the project develops a broader reflection on the journeys of images, objects and cultural practices, and on the power relations that have shaped the way these histories have been told. Sadopítna, o sea, antípodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo takes this research into the realm of flamenco, moving it away from its usual context to create new connections between geographies, bodies and histories.
In the adjoining room, The Circle Project, by Bouchra Khalili, revisits the history of the Arab Workers' Movement (MTA) and its theatre groups Al Assifa and Al Halaka, which emerged in France in the 1970s. Through two video installations and a mural poster, the artist works with testimonies, archives, photographs and accounts to reconstruct a collective memory connected to the struggles of migrant workers for their rights and for their own representation.
Although they emerge from different contexts, both projects focus on what happens when histories move from one territory to another and from one generation to the next. In Continentes como semillas, the geographies of flamenco shift and intermingle; in The Circle Project, the memory of a community is reconstructed through voices, images and experiences passed down over time.
The dialogue between the two exhibitions thus raises a shared question about who constructs cultural narratives, how they are transmitted and what happens when these narratives are revisited from other perspectives.
The Circle Project remains on view until 29 November 2026.
