Sadopitna

“Sadopitna”, which means antipodes, turned upside down and back to front, is the title of the works that Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero presented at the 2023 Sydney Biennale. Following presentations at the Ateneo de Manila and the CARA space in New York, the project is now presented again in collaboration with the artists Natalia Álvarez, Citlali Córdova and Larisa Escobedo.

The artists began working with a carnivalesque idea of flamenco originating in the Pacific Ocean. With all the colonial implications this entails, yet with a permeability that extends to the present day, flamenco is conceived as a medium rather than a subject. The aim was to create a good wardrobe for their songs. In this way, their territory is shaped by a strange archipelago—a set of elements connected by what separates them—ranging from the Philippines of José Rizal, and the Japan of Kazuo Ohno or Teiji Ito, to the New Zealand of Darcy Lange and Miriam Snijders, or the Samoa of Lemi Ponifasio.

Without doubt, the works of Natalia Álvarez on cockfighting brought from the Philippines and its symbolic and queer implications; those of Citlali Córdova, starting from mineral extraction in Zacatecas—an intermediate scale of the colonial galleon economy—and the cultural resistances it generated; and those of Larisa Escobedo, beginning from the Mexican antipodes somewhere in Southeast Asia to relativise common ideas about origins and to propose a new system of relations between Asia, Abya Yala and al-Andalus, together form a rich arsenal of references, lines of flight and fields of meaning which, through their interaction, contextualise the proposal of “Sadopitna”.