After its world premiere at the 5th edition of the BoCA Biennial, this commission—now in circulation—is being presented for the first time in Évora as part of the Academia do Vagar, bringing together Pedro G. Romero—visual artist and researcher, winner of Spain’s National Plastic Arts Award in 2024—in a conference-performance conceived as a critical device, structured to open up a space for reflection and thought, developed from a research process shared with Niño de Elche.
At a time when popular culture still bears the traces of its instrumentalization by Iberian dictatorships, this project recovers its original vocation: mixed, fluid, permeable to the other. During a period of research and creation in the Iberian border region between Portugal and Spain, Pedro G. Romero and Niño de Elche sought to activate collaborative practices that challenge the crystallized forms of tradition, exposing their friction with the present, and which transported them from fandango to Portuguese tango or from the viola campaniça to Sephardic liturgy.
With “Descomposición/Choro,” Pedro G. Romero reconstructs and exposes sound connections that map the relationship between the popular cultural practices of communities and the Iberian space, both physical and emotional. This conference-performance is a listening to the border that rejects its connotation as a line of separation, but embraces it as a vibrant zone of encounters and tensions, where music, language, and collective practices continue to (re)write stories to come.
