continents like seeds

continents like seeds gathers the practices of La Chola Poblete (b. 1989, Argentina), Niño de Elche (b. 1985, Spain), and Pedro G. Romero (b. 1964, Spain). The artists unravel the contradictions of colonial legacies across sonics, sculpture, drawing, and performance, attending to the entanglements of appropriation and erasure. Their practices complicate how social and cultural identities are claimed, contested, or imposed without seeking resolution, but rather by opening conversations about life and transformation beyond inscribed territories.

Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero engage with transnational histories of flamenco through research, music, and embodied practice. Their collaboration maps antipodean connections formed in and around the imperial trade routes that shaped flamenco, particularly the Manila Galleon (1565–1815). The work unfolds as songs that trace these circuits of exchange and contamination, underscoring the webs that link Spain, Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Samoa. Niño de Elche and G. Romero ground these histories in embroidered flamenco shawls, or mantones de Manila, which were produced in China, sold in the Americas, worn and reinterpreted in Mexico and the Philippines, and later appropriated as symbols of “Spanish culture.” Colliding the mantones with sound and references to Minimalist sculpture, the artists’s work exposes legacies of extraction, change, and insurgency. As a testament to flamenco’s enduring vitality, the project expands through a series of live performances with Niño de Elche, Arto Lindsay, Paula Comitre, Sumie Kaneko, Raül Refree, Lee Ranaldo, and Yinka Esi Graves.

While Niño de Elche and G. Romero’s sonic map charts the reach of colonial trade, La Chola Poblete turns to the body as both inscribed with and in resistance to colonial logics. Often using herself as material and subject of artistic creation, La Chola blurs the distinction between her persona and the cultural figures she invokes. In her drawings, matriarchal figures like La Virgen and Pachamama, an Andean earth deity, intersect with trans subjectivities, revolutionary icons like Che Guevara, or the logo of Quilmes, an Argentine beer named after an Indigenous word. Rooted in mestiza and Indigenous knowledges, her syncretic approach invites a critique that honors these spiritual and cultural figures and points to their use and misuse by colonial powers. La Chola’s practice questions how bodies “should” act under systems of capitalism and patriarchy. With these interrogations in mind, her work evokes the political landscape of Argentina, rife with the contradictions of nationalism, religion, and consumerism. She unsettles dominant narratives and critiques commodity fetishism with parody and irreverence.

La Chola Poblete, Niño de Elche, and Pedro G. Romero’s practices unsettle topographies of violence and surface subaltern imaginaries. The energies of rupture and renewal that flow among these three artists’s practices call in the transnational poetics of writer and activist June Jordan (1936–2002). Jordan’s words from the 1969 publication Who Look at Me set our stage: “New energies of darkness we/ disturbed a continent/ like seeds.” With her invitation for insurgency as one point of departure, continents like seeds traces a path in which echoes of colonialism may be further complicated and, potentially, resignified.

continents like seeds is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive and Artistic Director, with Marian Chudnovsky, Curatorial Assistant.

Special thanks to the Consulate General of Spain in New York, Fundación Ama Amoedo, and Instituto Cervantes de Nueva York for supporting continents like seeds.