The Pool: Swim or Sink

In The Party, actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is mistakenly invited to a glamorous dinner party in Hollywood. His curiosity and two left feet lead to one funny mishap after the other. During the soiree he consoles Michèle, a young actress who has been fired by her producer, and the chaos gathers momentum when Bakshi accidentally opens a retractable floor, making the guests fall into a swimming pool. A small hippie-style elephant gatecrashes the party, brought by a group of young people, and Bakshi asks the guests to wash the elephant as it is a sacred animal in his country. The house fills with soap suds, culminating in a wackily chaotic party.  

When Stanley Kubrick was once asked who Peter Sellers was, he replied: “There is no such person as Peter Sellers”. The Party is one of the most widely recognised comedies in the history of film, its director Blake Edwards and the English actor making an entertaining critique of a fading conservative society. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s fit into the container of a choppy swimming pool: people from high society, an elephant, a Russian ballet, waiters, beatnik youth… similar to Sellers’s own identity: an empty vessel that can be refilled. In the film, Edwards tapped into the ingenious actor’s innate improvisation and the swimming pool as a container for revolutionary intent.

A couple of families spend the summer in a country cottage. The relationship between them exposes a crisis. The alcoholism of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) becomes clear, leading to a drift in the education of their children and impacting relationships of respect and affect. Weariness expresses the lackadaisical environment.   

In La ciénaga Lucrecia Martel approaches the decadence of a middle-class Argentinian family. The pool of dirty, stagnant water reflects the economic and social collapse of a whole country, yet reflects more than economic crisis as it becomes a murky well feeding off the pain of those living in the house. An erstwhile space of joy, the swimming pool becomes a reflection of adult depression, resulting in apathy. And the children, especially the girls, seem to be the only people awake in this drift. Barring a flicker of unawareness, the young people immerse themselves in rainwater or the water from the river, in water that flows, but are cautious of getting too close to the swimming pool.

A couple with three adult children live in a modern country cottage. A large swimming pool takes centre stage in a sizeable garden. The property is skirted by a large fence that blocks a view of the outside. Here, the father has educated his children without outside contact, maintaining their belief in a false world: aeroplanes fall in the garden like toys and they must act like dogs to defend themselves from the ferocious cats that surround the house. The promise of going out into the world when they lose their dogtooth is proof of their maturity. 

Lanthimos builds a world that is surreal, comical and terrible. The swimming pool is the house’s central element, a limited, controlled space assimilated like the sea, yet under the father’s supervision. A space of imagination, but with sinister intentions: the children are indoctrinated under the water as they believe in a better world. Far from reality. The swimming pool’s limits are the limits of their freedom, a false state of well-being expressed in the weightless bodies in the water. The liquid element is an analgesic magma with the power to educate offspring under the latent fear of a shark bite.

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.

Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.

For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.    

Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.  

Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.   

In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.

The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.    

In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down. 

Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces. 

The swimming pool and dancing aquatic bodies as a place of reverie and fascination in the advent of Hollywood and the fledgling entertainment industry. A musical prior to the moralising Hays Code in which a visionary Busby Berkeley directs one of the most lavish mass-participation choreographies in the history of cinema. The main number is By a Waterfall, with a pool and hundreds of bathers front and centre. After observing this piece, Salvador Dalí considered Busby Berkeley an equal in his paranoid delirium and a major influence on his installations, for instance the work he made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. 

The story follows a brilliant theatre director who dreams up grandiose musical numbers to be performed in cinemas before each screening, saving live performance from the rise of spoken film. Therefore, he throws himself into a race to show the world the three most lavish musicals ever imagined. Along with Honeymoon Hotel and Shanghai Lil, By a Waterfall stands out and is considered the most striking film choreography focused on the plastic possibilities of the swimming pool. Hundreds of swimmers turn their bodies into monumental, abstract geometric figures in a crescendo of surprise and wonder which builds the swimming pool into the essential architecture for a Hollywood conceived as a new factory of dreams. 

The body in water as an object of ideology. This is one of the major themes of the 1930s and this session, where Nazism and Anarchism dissolve into two different swimming pools. Two great films of counterposed ideologies which have gone down in history as examples of film’s power to represent a vision of the world. In Olympia, Part 2. Festival of Beauty, Leni Riefenstahl films the Olympic Games of Berlin in 1936, organised during the Third Reich. The camera leaves the athletics stadium to show the repertoire of modern sports — fencing, polo, cycling, pentathlon — before culminating in the Olympic pool with Adolf Hitler as the host, where the beautiful, disciplined, classical bodies of the swimmers bring to mind, as Susan Sontag wrote, the visual fascination that characterised fascism. Meanwhile, Jean Vigo, the son of an exiled Spanish anarchist, films French Olympic champion Jean Taris in a funny, playful exercise, where the swimming pool becomes a field of play without rules and where avant-garde film-making elements of the 1930s materialise, such as slow motion, superimposed images and dynamic editing. Two avant-garde films, two films on opposite poles that show, for a time, swimming not as an object of pleasure or desire, but as a space of contest from which to demonstrate the power of the twentieth century’s great ideologies.

Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a frustrated English writer paralysed by writer’s block, is invited by her editor to spend a few days in her summer house in the south of France. While there she meets Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the editor’s uninhibited daughter. The young girl’s hypersexuality clashes with Morton’s cold nature, an initial hostility which turns into a fascination with the private life of the young girl, serving the writer as inspiration for her new novel and tugging the story to an ambiguous game between truth and imagination.   

Being in crisis is wanting to be another person. Sarah wants to absorb the vitality of her young host, a process of metamorphosis triggered by the swimming pool. The pool is the film’s central character, the place where Julie shows her naked body and amorous acts, sending Sarah into a state of agitation. Through the pool and its water, the writer drinks in Julie’s wild passion. The aquatic enclosure thus acts as catharsis: the place where the subconscious of the writer flourishes, enabling her to unleash her creativity and free her fantasies. At the same time, water distorts the image, blurring fiction and reality; ultimately, the necessary medium to keep art afloat.

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a criminal for the British mafia, lives happily retired with his wife in an idyllic villa in southern Spain and a dazzling swimming pool. Their peace is shattered with the arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a former gangster and criminal associate who wants to convince him to do one last job.  

If a swimming pool can be at the heart of suspense, then Sexy Beast is the quintessence. The reflection of blue water in Gal’s idyllic seclusion symbolises the artificial paradise that can be broken at any time. This first feature-length film by British director Jonathan Glazer (also the director of The Zone of Interest, 2023) starts with one of the most striking swimming pool scenes, a symbol for the impending danger about to reach this whitewashed haven of peace. The perfect vision of recreated beauty — luxury pools on the Andalusian coast — which, in the depths of pristine water, conceals an unsettling fear of returning to the past.

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a famous Hollywood actor, lives a life of pleasure in Hotel Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, drifting aimlessly between vacuous relationships, punctuated by film shoots and commercial duties. Cleo (Elle Fanning), his eleven-year-old daughter, stays with him for a few weeks due to her mother’s absence, forcing him to rethink his life.  

Sofia Coppola’s employment of swimming pools is carefully considered in the film — blue water in Somewhere is the only place where Marco can recover the meaning of his existence as the pool acts as a womb in which he finds balance. While living with his daughter Cleo and the reflection of these aquatic moments — diving under water, floating, playing or simply sunbathing with no real purpose — everything happens. Thus, Coppola explores in depth themes such as fame, loneliness and the complexity of human ties, putting forward an intimate and profound portrait full of the subtleties of life.

Céline Sciamma’s directorial debut, Naissance des pieuvres,depicts the emotional and sexual awakening of three teenagers around an indoor swimming pool in a Parisian suburb. Marie, a fifteen-year-old introvert, becomes fascinated by Floriane, the charismatic captain of a local synchronised swimming team. Driven by this attraction, Marie tries to get closer to her while observing the complex dynamics of desire, friendship and power that develops between the young girls. At the same time, Anne, one of Marie’s friends, has her own experience of insecurity and affective search, shaped by the pressure to fit in and belong. As the relationship between the three intensifies, contradictions surface between the image they outwardly project and their real feelings.  

Standing away from the common places on adolescence, Céline Sciamma explores first love, burgeoning queer identity and the uncertainty of desire with an intimate, observational gaze, resulting in a sensitive and honest portrait of a time of transformation, in which each gesture leads to the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Neddy Merrill (Burt Lancaster), a handsome and vigorous middle-aged man, decides to swim home via his neighbours’ swimming pools in an upscale gated community in Connecticut. He calls the waterway the “Lucinda River” in honour of his wife. Merrill is a high-profile advertising executive, seemingly loved and acknowledged by his neighbours, who invite him to embark upon his surreal idea.    

The Swimmer, initiated by Frank Perry and realised by director Sidney Pollack, is a bitter metaphor for life, the pools here a reflection of the “river of life”, a course that runs from the affluence of bygone bourgeois status to present-day decadence. Outwardly jovial and bright, the film shows the transition towards the eclipse of the American dream, the decline of youth and the impossibility of admitting defeat to phantasy. The swimming pool, which, according to Orson Welles in a 1964 interview, represented the obsession with status and the reason why many ultimately betrayed their comrades during McCarthyism, underpins here this idea of the superficiality entailed in the destruction of social ties.  

Ion de Sosa will open this fresh edition of the Museo Reina Sofía’s summer cinema series, a director whose film-making is counter-cultural, risqué and authentic, as well as fully alive and unpredictable. Balearic, one of the films of the year, is about a group of teenagers who are trapped in a swimming pool surrounded by a pack of ferocious dogs while an adult gathering gives over to the most decadent hedonism in a nearby pool. Images of pleasure and enjoyment that turn into feelings of horror and alienation, an antithetical reference point which gives form to this entire summer film season. Equally, the film mixes genres, where the lust of teenage cinema and the blood of the most insatiable slasher films co-exist with the social satire of neorealist social commentary.

Shot in a 16mm format, in which experiences proliferate to sprout beyond the screen, Balearic contains other traces of Ion de Sosa’s film-making, for instance the mix of professional and amateur actors, where a clutch of actors appears alongside icons from Spanish underground cinema such as Marta Bassols, Julián Génisson and Lorena Iglesias, regular companions on the film-maker’s cinematic journeys, and improvised scenes with no script, as with the dialogues of musician Christina Rosenvinge and artist María Llopis. The idea of Balearic has its roots in Ion de Sosa’s viewing of The Swimmer (1968) by Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack, also screened in this summer film series.

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.  

As part of his research residency at the Museum, Olivier Marboeuf explores how communities can be gathered through the telling and retelling of stories, in a process in which narratives are continually reshaped, giving rise to a collective tale that is always open, unfinished and imprecise.

This workshop, conceived for the communities of Lavapiés, brings together storytelling, writing, drawing and embodied movement to create a collective map of life in the neighbourhood. Individual stories and gestures become part of a shared composition, opening up spaces for encounter, friction and exchange.

The aim of Blueprints. Paper Constellations of Lavapiés’ Memory is to create a graphic score for a conversation in many voices, connecting words with the traces of movements, encounters, accidents and coincidences registered on paper as prints of each participant. These individual movements come together in a choreography inscribed in a mural of interwoven stories, shaped not only by consensus and attentive listening, but also by cacophony, disagreement and contradiction. In doing so, the workshop explores the idea of transition in two interconnected senses: as physical movement or migration from one place to another, and as a process of change and transformation—such as the transformation a story undergoes as it is told, translated and passed from one person to another.

The study seminar De-speaking institutions: three rehearsals takes place within the framework of Olivier Marboeuf’s year-long research residency, titled The Mutineer and the Witch: Essays on Cultural and Institutional Mediation. The seminar consists of a total of six sessions, structured around three essays developed over the course of a year. These sessions complement, inform, and engage in dialogue with the other activities that make up Studies Constellation 2026–2027. 

This study seminar is proposed as a space of collective discussion, exchange and bricolage around institutional imagination and craft. The proposition here is to take the experience and learnings of mediation as a vantage point from which to project, deflect, speculate and hallucinate other models and matters of cultural institutionality: forms capable of rehearsing alternative visions of site, work organisation, production, artistic practice and the circulation of knowledge, while redistributing interpretative and institutional agency. 

If we are to understand mediation as a bewitched practice that produces negotiated interpretations and narratives in which conditions of presence, interruption, recognition, representation and autonomy are brought into play through interwoven stories and visions, we need to reckon with it as a practice of institutional invention: a practice shaping who may appear, speak, interpret and narrate; which histories become legible; and which forms of opacity, refusal, dissonance and relation may endure. This understanding draws on long-standing traditions of storytelling, particularly Caribbean storytelling, understood as a collective practice of transmission and transformation through which dispersed histories, spectral presences and interrupted experiences are brought together again in situated ways. Each telling is a repetition with a difference, a reprise située: the past is reactivated, altered through the conditions of the present and returned to collective interpretation. 

Repetition, reprise, and rehearsal emerge here as a central methodological thread. Rehearsal is approached as a mode of knowledge produced through situated repetition, in which each rehearsal registers the material, historical and political conditions that enable a form to emerge, the forces that interrupt it, reinterpreted it, displace it —and the transformations required for its return. The attention is here on the political choreographies of these forms of circulation, negotiation and reappearance request, and what shape an institution that becomes the scene in which stories are retold and contested can take. 

Other methods and devices that animate this research are the interpretative community, the archive, and collective hallucination. Communities of interpretation are approached as a collective formation coalescing around stories, objects, archives and problems; a group committed to their interpretation, transmission and consequences through disagreement, partial understanding, and the coexistence of irreducible positions. Interpretation here becomes a collective practice of composition, sustained through duration, responsibility, and return. In turn, archiving will be approached as a living practice in which minor, diasporic and interrupted histories persist in voices, gestures, rumors, silences, objects, landscapes, songs; activated through the act of telling, when dispersed traces are brought into relation in the present. Additionally, collective hallucination offers another method for institutional imagination. Hallucination is understood as a collective alteration of the conditions of perception, emerging from specific histories, debts, bodies and conflicts, and producing other ways of sensing what an institution may become. 

The seminar will further explore Marboeuf’s notion of déparler, or de-speaking, developed in relation to cinema and extended here toward institutional and research practice. To déparler is to undo the authority of instituted speech, disorganise dominant codes of legibility and allow voices to deviate from the identities and positions assigned to them. A déparlante institution thus interrupts the confidence of its own language and makes room for noise, hesitation, multilingualism, opacity, contradiction and embodied knowledge, making room for plural and self-displaced modes of address. This movement is in turn connected to cacophony, as a mode of composition in which voices retain their differences, tensions and unequal positions, sustaining plurality without dissolving conflict and allowing disagreement to become part of the institutional form itself. Through this perspective, other rhythms of facilitation, governance and duration are incorporated, and a space for narratives that remain adjacent without becoming interchangeable is open. 

By bringing together experiences from different territories, this seminar aims to imagine non-extractive institutional forms that promote autonomy, while exploring how these might be translated and interpreted in different cultural contexts and economies. To institute, here, means composing a situation, sustaining a relation, activating a latent history, hosting an interruption and producing the conditions under which something can be told again. An art space may therefore emerge with or without walls: as a temporary gathering, a community of interpretation, a living archive, a mobile infrastructure, a wake, a souffle, a rehearsal or a circulation of stories, tools and obligations. 

El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.

Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.

El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.

De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.

Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.