QUESTIONING TRADITIONS AT CARA
The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) spring 2025 exhibition, continents like seeds, brings together the work of La Chola Poblete (b. 1989, Argentina), Niño de Elche (b. 1985, Spain), and Pedro G. Romero (b. 1964, Spain); through sound, sculpture, performance, drawing, and painting, the show unravels and exposes the contradictions and ambiguities of colonial legacies.
Tracing entanglements of erasure and violence, visibility and appropriation, the artists question tradition and offer counter-narratives of resistance, transformation, and life.
Performer Niño de Elche and artist Pedro G. Romero’s installation, co-commissioned by CARA and the Biennale of Sydney, engages with transnational histories of flamenco through research, music, and embodied practice. Titled Sadopítna, o sea, antípodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo (Sedopitna, or antipodes, turned inside out and upside down), 2023, the audiovisual collaboration maps antipodean connections formed through colonial trade routes, particularly the Manila Galleon. Arranged as a suite of four soundboxes wrapped in Mantones de Manila, embroidered shawls derived from traditional Filipina alampay, the work unfolds through nine songs which interrogate and disentangle colonial contaminations across the Pacific Ocean and around Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Aotearoa (otherwise known as New Zealand), and Samoa.
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Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero, 'Sadopítna, o sea, antípodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo (Sedopitna, or antipodes, turned inside out and upside down),' 2023. Detail courtesy the artists
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La Chola Poblete, 'Venus, marrona rajada,' 2023. Iron structure, galvanized mesh, bread, and wig. 162x30x30 cm. Installation view courtesy the artist
Throughout the course of the exhibition, Niño de Elche will be joined by artists, musicians, and dancers for a series of live performances that animate the songs’s lyrics and illuminate flamenco’s potential as a tool for rebellion against systems of power. “The boxes and the bodies of the artists become one through performance,” remarked G. Romero.
La Chola Poblete’s work explores the body and past narratives through performance, video, painting, and sculpture. Merging her own identity with cultural and religious figures, she questions how bodies should behave under capitalism and patriarchy, and how an Indigenous, gendered body can rebel through creation. Her work combines ancestral knowledge, queer fantasies, and pop iconographies, endowing figures like the Virgin and Pachamama with decolonial potential. Her sculpture Venus, marrona rajada (2023) expands the notion of fluidity, while her syncretic approach critiques and reinterprets spiritual power, rejecting its colonial appropriation.
Expanding beyond any singular history or culture, continents like seeds disrupts trails of extractivist violence and surfaces the subaltern imaginings of La Chola Poblete, Niño de Elche, and Pedro G. Romero. In her 1969 publication Who Look at Me, poet, activist, and scholar June Jordan (1936–2002) writed: “New energies of darkness we/ disturbed a continent/ like seeds.” This exhibition, in line with Jordan’s writing and thinking, draws in such energies of rupture and renewal. It is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive and Artistic Director, with Marian Chudnovsky, Curatorial Assistant.
continents like seeds will be on display until May 18, 2025, at CARA, 225 West 13th Street, New York (United States).
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