![Pablo Picasso, Sur le dos de l’inmence tranche [En la parte posterior de la rebanada], 1935. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Successió Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2023](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/picasso.jpg.webp)
Held on 06 Jun 2023
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, addressing subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This edition surveys the lesser-examined side of Pablo Picasso: as a poet. The visual, sound and performance quality of his poetry is deepened in the dialogue between text, sound and image, elements that form the backbone of the activity, structured around a performance recital of a selection of poems — with a new Spanish translation by Jèssica Jaques Pi — followed by a conversation between Androula Michael, an editor and expert in Picasso’s literary work, and members of the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
An exploration of Picasso’s poetry — and dramaturgy — can refashion common places in interpreting his visual work given that for him writing, drawing, painting and sculpting were hybrid activities and at times indiscernible, despite the first lacking the same recognition.
The creator of Guernica (1937) wrote some three hundred and fifty poems in Spanish and French, the earliest of which were penned in both languages and dated 1935, but were more than likely created even earlier, possibly during his youth in Spain. A large number of these poems were published in the artist’s lifetime, for instance: “Fandango de lechuzas” (Fandango of Owls), which appeared alongside the prints Sueño y mentira de Franco (The Dream and Lie of Franco, 1937), and the compendiums Scritti di Picasso (1935-1947) (1964), Poèmes et lithographies (Poems and Lithographs, 1954) and Trozo de piel (Hunk of Skin, 1960), in addition to the theatre works Le désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail, 1945) and Les quatre petites filles (The Four Little Girls, 1949).
Another trait of Picassian poetry is its polyglotism. As an adult, the artist thought, felt, spoke and wrote in three languages: his native Spanish-Andalusian tongue, the Catalan of his youth during his time in Barcelona and, after settling in Paris, French — it was no accident that his closest friends were brilliant poets, the likes of Max Jacob, André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Paul Éluard. This multilingualism was joined by iconoclasm, with Picasso mixing and resignifying languages, since poetry served to evoke that which painting could not represent, for instance a “mouth full of the cinch-bug jelly of his words”, a verse from “Fandango of Owls”. The variety of calligraphy and the amplitude of signs and geometric figures also take his writing to the threshold between image and word, a characteristic of boundless creativity.
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Bárbara Bayarri Viñas is a writer, teacher and curator, and a member of the Philosophy Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is also head of strategy in the Open Up project within Creative Europe. Her PhD thesis, currently in progress, is entitled Generating Knowledge in Art Museums. Picasso’s Meninas as a Device for the Emergence of Other Practices and Discourses.
Daniela Callejas Aristizabal is a designer, artist and researcher, and a member of the Philosophy Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her doctoral thesis, From Picasso to Contemporary Poetics. Light, Darkness and the Body as Devices of Memory and Imagination, looks to build channels of disruptive and undisciplined poetic readings on conventional art-making, developing a contemporary visual poetry through an art of light and experimentation.
Jèssica Jaques Pi is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and co-director of the Picasso PhD. She is also the author of Picasso en Gósol, 1906: un verano para la modernidad (Antonio Machado, 2007) and head researcher on the project Los escritos de Picasso: textos teatrales, 2016-2018 (Picasso’s Writings: Theatre Texts, 2016–2018) from Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Beatriz Martínez López is a hired pre-doctoral researcher on the FPU (University Teacher Training) programme in the Spanish National Research Council’s Art and Heritage Department. She has carried out research residences in Paris and Barcelona and received a grant in the Students’ Residency of Madrid 2020–2022. Some of her research has been published in national and international journals and explores issues related to her doctoral thesis, entitled Between Francoism and Spanish Republican Exile. An Analysis of the Political Utilisation of the Figure and Work of Pablo Picasso.
Androula Michael is head professor of Art History at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, where she is also the director of the Centre de Recherche en Arts et en Esthétique and in charge of international relations at the Unités de Formations et de Recherche en Histoire de l’art et archéologie. Michael also co-directs the Picasso PhD. She has been part of curatorial teams on exhibitions such as Picasso’s Kitchen and Picasso Poet (both in Museu Picasso in 2018 and 2019, respectively), Picasso at the Cyprus Museum. Works in Clay (Cyprus Museum, 2019) and Return to Africa (Bandjoun Station, 2019).
Laura Vilar Dolç is a dancer, creator, teacher and researcher who centres her studies on artistic research through dance. She is a member of the teaching team on the MA in Research in Art and Design at the EINA Centro Universitario de Diseño y Arte de Barcelona and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and co-directs the artistic research centre NunArt, as well as being part of the Dance Pedagogy Department at Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. Her latest creation is Tentativas de (des)aparición (Attempts at (Dis)appearing, 2021–2022), a performance which is part of her PhD research.
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7pm Fandango de lechuzas (Fandango of Owls) Performance
By Laura Vilar
7:20pm Poetry Reading
Fandango de lechuzas (1937), translated from French by Jèssica Jaques Pi. By Alberto Chessa and Lola Herrero
7:35pm Video Recital Ascua de Amistad (Ember of Friendship)
By Daniela Callejas
7:40pm Conversation with Androula Michel and Jèssica Jaques Pi (first part)
Presented and moderated by the gynocentric collective from the Picasso PhD
8pm Poetry Reading
18 April 1935, Spanish original. By Lola Herrero.
6 January 1957, part of El entierro del conde de Orgaz (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1957–1959), translated from French by Jèssica Jaques Pi. By Alberto Chessa and Lola Herrero
8:15pm Conversation with Androula Michel and Jèssica Jaques Pi (second part)
8:35pm Poetry Reading
14 December 1935, translated from French by Jèssica Jaques Pi. By Alberto Chessa
31 May 1952, dedicated to Nikos Beloyannis after his execution on 30 March of the same year, translated from French by Jèssica Jaques Pi. By Lola Herrero
14 August 1957, part of El entierro del conde de Orgaz (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz), Spanish original. By Alberto Chessa
Part of the official programme Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023
The National Commission to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s Death
With the support of
Telefónica, Spain’s participating company in Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023
Collaboration
illycaffèOrganised by
Inside the framework of
With the support of
Collaborating company in Spain
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
![Mike Nichols, The Graduate [El graduado], 1967, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ciclocine-piscinas-9_0.jpg.webp)
Mike Nichols. The Graduate
Friday, 31 July 2026
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.
Sol Iglesias. The Swimmers
Saturday, 1 August 2026
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.
Jack Hazan. A Bigger Splash
Friday, 7 August 2026
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.
Six Swimming Pools. A Dive into Experimental Film
Saturday, 8 August 2026
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.
Dominga Sotomayor. Debajo and Thais Fujinaga. A Felicidade das Coisas
Friday 14 August 2026
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.