Commissioned by BoCA, this project brings together Niño de Elche — a singular figure in the Spanish music and performance scene who identifies as “ex-flamenca” — and Pedro G. Romero — a visual artist and researcher, winner of Spain’s 2024 National Award for Plastic Arts — in a work presented in two formats: a conference-performance with Pedro G. Romero, and a concert with Niño de Elche and folk musicians from the Iberian “Stripe”.

At a time when folk culture still bears the traces of its instrumentalization by the Iberiandictatorships, this project recovers its original meanings: hybrid , fluid, permeable to others. During a period of research and writing in the Iberian border region, between Portugal and Spain, Pedro G. Romero and Niño de Elche activated collaborative practices that challenge the fossilised forms of tradition and expose its friction with the present, transporting the two between the fandango and Portuguese tango, and the viola campaniça and Sephardic liturgy. More than collection or reinterpretation, the project acts as an artistic and political gesture: restoring folk culture’s power as a site of hybridisation, conflict and
reinvention.

With “Descomposición/Choro”, Pedro G. Romero reconstructs and exposes sonic connections mapping the relationships linking community folk cultural practices to the Iberian landscape, both physical and emotional. This conference-performance is an act of listening to the border not as a line of separation, but as a vibrant zone of confluence and conflict, where music, language and collective practices continue to (re)write stories still to come.