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 film of the dance piece, MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony, by Eszter Salamon and, on the other, Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, another dance piece, a choreography by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins that delves deep into the relationships between desire, dance, fragmentation, love (understood as communality), mourning and time. Its premiere occurred recently, in September, in Antwerp.

The Polish-British artist is a co-founder of the collective Kem, based in Warsaw, a queer, antiracist feminist community (with everything that entails right now with an ultra-right government in power in Poland) who explores choreography, performance and sound as part of an ambitious social action plan. Baczyński-Jenkins’s works are an antithesis of the economy of contemporary experience, based on the fleeting and easily digestible. He composes his pieces based on miniscule, detailed, fragile, sharp and subtle gestures and movements. Through gesture, sensuality, touch and relationality, Baczyński-Jenkins’s practice unfolds the structures and politics of desire. Relationality is present in the dialogue forms with which the pieces are developed and performed, as well as in the materials and poetics invoked. This includes the study of the relationships between sensation and sociability, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of daily experience and the utopian and latent queer legacies.