Crossroads between artists, cultural disciplines and styles at the VII Festival Encuentros en el M/A/L

The Extremaduran guitarist and singer-songwriter Susan Santos and the unique collages of El Niño Sombra open the programme, which will feature the illustrator and comic author Carla Berrocal, the cartoonist Rayco Pulido, the digital artist Nolo Sanchesky, the social project of DtProject, the filmmaker Miguel G. Morales, and concerts by Antiplacton and Piedraviva, among others.

The Festival Encuentros en el M/A/L (Music, Culture and Literature) has become a crossroads between different artistic disciplines, creators and styles. In its seventh edition, it is once again proposing an eclectic programme that combines the global and the local, with activities on three islands: Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Gomera. More than a dozen cultural proposals in the fields of film, music, comics and collage as an artistic expression. The Festival will begin in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Tenerife, with a concert by the Extremaduran guitarist and singer-songwriter Susan Santos, on 2 May, at the Teatro Leal, and the exhibition Collage El Niño Sombra, at the University of La Laguna, from 5 to 15 May.

This is the beginning of an extensive programme, which will feature illustrator and comic author Carla Berrocal, cartoonist Rayco Pulido, digital artist Nolo Sanchesky, the social project DtProject, filmmaker Miguel G. Morales, and concerts by Antiplacton and Piedraviva, among others. This seventh edition of Encuentros en el M/A/L (Música, culturA y Letras), produced by Cauproges, is an activity supported by the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (INAEM), the Gobierno de Canarias, through its public companies PROMOTUR Turismo Islas Canarias and Instituto Canario de Desarrollo Cultural, Cabildo de Tenerife, Turismo de Tenerife, and with the collaboration of TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, and the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y de la Comunicación de la Universidad de La Laguna.

The Festival Encuentros en el M/A/L, which celebrates its seventh anniversary in 2025, is committed to equal access to cultural content and offers added value with a unique programme compared to what already exists in the archipelago. The Festival aims to enable those attending the activities to deepen their understanding of music and cultural contexts, as well as to explore subcultures related to these artistic expressions that are not always manifested in live performances.

Guitar virtuoso

This seventh edition will begin on 2 May at 9 p.m. at the Teatro Leal in La Laguna, with a concert by Susan Santos, a guitarist from Extremadura who has six albums on the market, the latest of which is entitled Sonora, a musical journey through this desert and its people, through survival, arid nature, flight and freedom. Tickets are on sale at Tickety.es.

Santos is considered an artist who is refreshing the contemporary blues and rock scene. This guitarist, who is left-handed, writes her own songs, combining rhythm and textures, building a musical proposal that she has already taken to numerous festivals in Europe and America. In addition to Sonora (2024), she has released Take Me Home (2010), Shuffle Woman (2012), Electric Love (2014), Skin & Bones (2016) No U Turn (2018) and The LA Sessions EP (2020).

El Niño Sombra: a “modern slimeball”

A blessed chance that came from nothing and everything at the same time created El Niño Sombra, a “modern slimeball” who weaves new worlds, with photographic paper, nostalgia, romanticism, poetry, irony and social criticism. The result, a collage with a vintage air that traps and provokes reflection and slow viewing to enjoy all the symbols and details. A journalist in another life, El Niño Sombra is an artist who has grown up to be a little boy and is exhibiting some of his work, from 5 to 15 May, in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of La Laguna, free of charge.

After the exhibition, El Niño Sombra will be followed by Nolo Sanchesky, a visual artist who will be exhibiting his digital art and collages as a way of challenging aesthetic conventions. His exhibition, at the same Faculty, from 19 to 29 May, can also be visited free of charge. The public will enjoy the fusion of the local with the universal and the challenge to the barriers between the digital and the traditional, in the search for new artistic paths.

Listen and draw

The TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes will be one of the venues of the Festival Encuentros en el M/A/L. On 22 May, Escuchar La Sombra will be screened, a documentary that brings to light the commitment of thousands of Cubans who travelled to the Spanish mainland to defend the Second Republic from fascism. Its director, Miguel G. Morales, a filmmaker and visual artist who creates from the periphery of non-fiction, will be present at this event.

Two days later, on 24 May, the Dialogue with Creators will begin, featuring the cartoonist and illustrator Carla Berrocal, a key figure in Spanish comics today, who tackles stories from a feminist point of view. Although she began publishing her first works in 2004, it was in 2021 that a wider public was able to enjoy her work, when Reservoir Books published her comic Doña Concha, inspired by the life of the famous folklorist and which she developed after being awarded the residency of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. In 2024 came La Tierra Yerma (Reservoir Books), a Spanish and feminist western, which creates a feminine imaginary in the Castilian plateau.

Another illustrator, Rayco Pulido, will be the protagonist of Dialogue with Creators, on 31 May. Born in Telde, Gran Canaria, and with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, he alternates teaching with his work as a comic artist. In 2017 he won the National Comic Prize for his work Lámia (Astiberri). Years earlier, with the same publishing house A Nela, he had published an adaptation of the remembered novel Marianela, by Benito Pérez Galdós, for the world of cartoons.

dtproject's “Valientes”

The philanthropic organisation Dtproject was founded in 2005 and since then, its cooperation projects with international organisations have led to productions in more than 25 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. At Encuentros en el M/A/L 2025, he will be present in two ways: he will give a concert, as part of his tour of Spain, in which he will perform 14 songs composed for his latest project: Valientes, and he will screen the documentary of the same name. These two artistic proposals revolve around denouncing human trafficking, a very painful subject that they tackle through art, but also through social commitment, in order to raise awareness and make trafficking in people for the purpose of sexual exploitation more visible.

The documentary consists of two episodes, which will be screened on 28 and 29 May at the Teatro Leal, in La Laguna, at 7 p.m., while the concert will take place on 31 May, at 8 p.m., at the same venue. Tickets for these two activities are on sale at Tickety.es.

Encounters with Music

The Festival will give visibility to several musical proposals, with artists of different styles. On 10 May, the Buenos Aires Jazz Café, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, will host the show Piedraviva, named after the album by Juan León, in trio format, with Carmen Rodríguez (vocals) and Iván C. Hernández (vocals and timple). This proposal is an exercise in experimentation and fusion based on Canarian folklore, which combines both oral and written traditions to configure a sonorous journey through the tango herreño, the airs of lima, the mazurca herreña or the arrorró majorero, among others. Tickets are on sale at eldiostaquilla.com.

On 7 June, Antiplancton, a rock and electronic band from the Canary Islands, will perform at the Festival, this time in La Parte Baja, in La Orotava (Tenerife). Made up of musicians Carlos Castillo, Fabián Yanes, Nolo Hernández and Sergio Díaz, this band is based on electronic bases combined with acoustic drums, guitar energy and resounding synthesizers, until it reaches a melody that elegantly glides over the layers of rock and electronics.