A Theatre of the Present

The young, bright Bella (Yanina Kasheva), after unforeseen heartbreak at her graduation party, meets Apostol (Kosta Tsonev), a reserved architect, and Boyan (Kliment Denchev), a comedy actor who is cynical about his country. The three characters climb up to a diving board in a municipal swimming pool, where they begin a strange relationship of friendship, love and despair which reflects a generational clash.  

Binka Zhelyazkova, the great enfant terrible of Eastern European cinema, critic of the communist system and widely acclaimed film-maker beyond Bulgarian borders, made in The Swimming Pool a masterly metaphor for a country in decline. The public pool symbolises a closed, immovable enclosure where society is festering. From the height of a diving board she sees, in a panoptic view, the different generations living underneath a limited space. On one side, older people attempt to preserve the old revolutionary spirit with constant collective swimming exercises while, on the other, young people don’t hide the desire for freedom that remains unrealised. The result is an ideological clash in how to act and move in the enclosure, unearthing vast hypocrisy in the lost ideals of socialism, reflected in the total apathy of youth. The Swimming Pool for Zhelyazkova is a reflection of the disillusionment and existential void of a whole country and system.

The characters played by Alain Delon (Jean-Paul) and Romy Schneider (Marianne) experience their love in apparent splendour. A sun-drenched house, a blissful swimming pool, beautiful bodies, sexuality in abundance. The visit of Harry (Maurice Ronet), a successful musician, friend of Jean-Paul and ex-lover of Marianne, accompanied by his young and beautiful daughter Penélope (Jane Birkin), rocks their relationship, bringing to light the jealousy and insecurities of each one in a dark game of possession and male rivalry. 

If there was a definition of the glistening blue pool in this sexual thriller, it would be the paradise of Adam and Eve, represented by the shots of happiness of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in this swimming pool on France’s Côte d’Azur. The appearance of these two beautiful creatures kissing semi-naked by the water is one of film’s resonant images. The paradise cannot be fractured, not even by death. As in the crossing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where humanity’s first lovers bathed naked in the water, innocent to their imminent end, the reflection of the crystalline water of The Swimming Pool shows this game, and the deep traumas which, under this mantle, are hidden in the amorous relationships and limits that only love is capable of breaking to solve.  

In this session both endings to the film are screened: the original version, open and symbolic, and the Spanish version, marked by censorship during Francoism, and its sequence for a Spanish premiere — a stereotypical and reductive vision reflecting the sociological condition of the country.

Coinciding with the end of the Aurèlia Muñoz. Beings exhibition, this study day gathers international experts to explore the connections and affinities between the different movements that renovated languages of contemporary Textile Art from the late 1960s. Movements such as Nouvelle Tapisserie and Fibre Art found, from that decade onwards, epicentres in places as diverse as Lausanne, Warsaw, New York, São Paulo and Barcelona, their key figures, including Aurèlia Muñoz, embodying a community of artists engaged in constant dialogue and formal evolution.  

The study day Transnational Perspectives on Aurèlia Muñoz and Fibre Art offers, by way of experts and the show’s curatorial team, keys to situating the artist’s work within a framework crossed by major debates — both eco-political and aesthetic — that resonate strongly in today’s artistic dynamics.

Micro-credentials are short-term learning experiences (up to 150 hours/15 ECTS) which are certified at a European level. They aim to certify key competences of lifelong learning through eminently practical proposals, and with an active methodological approach.  

The University Micro-Credential in Intercultural and Multilingual Mediation within Artistic Contexts, organised by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), in a collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, seeks to develop knowledge around intercultural mediation to be practised in museum and art contexts, and from a perspective which integrates linguistic diversity to impart a more just, diverse and plural experience of contemporary art and culture. The micro-credential goes towards a university qualification issued by UAM.   

This initiative is the outcome of a shared research undertaking of linguistic justice between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and UAM’s Centre for Research in Multilingualism, Discourse and Communication (MIRCo). Following over twenty years of experience as a research group, MIRCo established itself in 2021 as an open science and citizen-engagement space that drives research on multilingual practices, speech and speakers in diaspora, interrelations between discourse and power, intercultural communication and the transformation of space via communicative linguistic spaces.   

This common interest materialises through ReDes_Ling, an interdisciplinary research and action project that studies language as a vehicle which reproduces social inequality, seeking to design actions that reduce its effects in society. The creation of this micro-credential constitutes one of these actions.  

Furthermore, the programme is rooted in the experience of the Aissatou Ndiaye School of Situated Mediation, propelled since 2022 by Museo Situado, in collaboration with teams from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Tentacular Museum and Education Department. By way of contact with works conserved in the Museo and with different professionals from the cultural sphere and social activists, mediators from this school will develop their own routes in different languages, including Spanish, Wolof, Bengali, Darija, Arabic, Tagalog and French, enriching the narratives in the Museo Reina Sofía Collections. Therefore, the school is encompassed within a reflection on and continuing work with cultural mediation to dissolve any barriers that stand in the way of practices, discourses and contemporary artworks and people of any age or social status.      

The convergence of these experiences makes the micro-credential a space of training which blends academic reflection, professional practice and a commitment to linguistic justice and cultural rights.  

In this first public presentation of his annual research fellowship at Museo Reina Sofía, entitled The Rioter and the Witch: Rehearsals on Cultural and Para-Institucional Mediation, Olivier Marboeuf addresses the question that guides his research: how might we summon the emancipatory power of rioting and storytelling as tools for mediation and institutional transformation, without succumbing to the heritagisation, depoliticisation or commodification of the ways of life that are inherent to them?

Whilst introducing the questions that guide his research project at the Museum, this presentation explores some of the central notions that underpin his artistic and research practice, such as ‘witch mediation’, the construction and legitimisation of ‘interpretative communities’, and the creation of speculative cartographies and archives. The concepts coined by Marboeuf arise from a back-and-forth between theory and his sustained career as an artist, cultural organiser, community storyteller and film producer, always concerned with the conditions of presence, representation, autonomy and visibility of minority practices within the cultural institution.

By understanding mediation as a bewitched practice, Marboeuf proposes kindle this practice as a politics of collective hallucination which, by re-enacting the emancipatory potential of Caribbean storytelling, destabilises and negotiates who can appear, speak, interpret and narrate, and which stories become legible, without renouncing opacity. Hence, in his work, cartography emerges as a speculative methodology that does not rely on representation, but rather on the presence of a community that collectively interprets a plural and cacophonous narrative, one that is never transparent or definitive.