This year, the Reina Sofía National Museum is participating in the Festival del Otoño programming with a double entry whose general title is DUELO COLECTIVO Y DUELO PLANETARIO (COLLECTIVE MOURNING & PLANETARY MOURNING). On the one hand, it presents the dance piece Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, with choreography and direction by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins and, on the other, the film of another dance piece, MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony, by Eszter Salamon. The video recording of the dance was a revolution in the history of this art in its day, given that until then there had been no further mediums for dance than the bodies of the choreographers and dancers, which would inevitably end up lost to the passage of time.

Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon works in several formats, from performance to conference and, in the last seven years, she has created a series of pieces she calls Monuments to, in her words ‘emphasise or insist on my relationship to history and, in parallel, propose a more open reflection on our collective relationship to it.’ Each of the pieces has a different aesthetic and format, sometimes opposing, and there is a total of 10 works at present. They are, as she describes them, ‘tests and exercises on returning, discovery, celebration and speculations surrounding history’. The sixth monument, Heterochrony, premiered in 2019, strengthens the lines she had been exploring in previous pieces, so that she once again created a collective imaginary between the past and the present. The proposal brings together influences from Sicilian musical archives with choreographic sensations inspired by mummification rituals in the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo. While a body of nine performers moves, we hear texts by Salamon herself, along with others by Elodie Perrin and Paul Éluard and excerpts from classical compositions from the 12th to 19th centuries.