Continents Like Seeds

CARA’s spring 2025 exhibition, curated by Manuela Moscoso, with Marian Chudnovsky, challenges extractivist violence and presents the subaltern visions of La Chola Poblete, Niño de Elche, and Pedro G. Romero.

“Continents Like Seeds” explores contradictions and ambiguities of colonial legacies across sonics, sculpture, performance, drawing, and painting. The artists question tradition, revealing counter-narratives of resistance, transformation, and life.

Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero’s installation, “Sadopítna, o sea, antípodas, puesto del revés y boca abajo” (2023), examines flamenco’s transnational histories through research, music, and embodied practice. The audiovisual work explores colonial trade routes, particularly the Manila Galleon, and includes nine songs that reflect on colonial contamination across the Pacific and beyond. During the exhibition, live performances will animate the lyrics and demonstrate flamenco’s potential as a tool for rebellion. “The boxes and bodies of the artists become one through performance,” says G. Romero.

While Niño de Elche and G. Romero engage with colonial trade legacies, La Chola Poblete focuses on the body’s currents. Using performance, video, photography, painting, and sculpture, she questions how bodies resist empire through fiction and creation. Her works blend personal and ancestral knowledge, queer fantasies, religious abstractions, and pop culture. La Chola critiques the Catholic missionary project while embracing spiritual figures like “La Virgen” and “Pachamama”, imbuing them with queer, decolonial potential. Her sculpture “Venus, marrona rajada” (2023) expands on fluidity, reflecting her syncretic approach to power and colonial resistance.