One of the springtime art-tourism attractions in London is going to the Design Museum to see the 15-meter-long reproduction of Monet's Water Lilies that Ai Weiwei (well, his team) has made using 650,000 Lego bricks. The trick is to go, get very close, and verify that the work is indeed made of Lego. The Chinese artist, who now lives in Portugal (a giant studio is being built in the Alentejo), is not the first to explore the possibilities of the Danish toy, which is, after all, like an analog pixel. The Ghanaian-Canadian artist Ekow Nimako builds imaginary civilizations based on the theory of Afrofuturism (the uchronia that imagines what would have happened to African civilizations if colonialism and slavery had not existed) and the Italian Marco Sodano recreates famous works from the history of blurry or pixelated art using Lego pieces.
THE MEMORIES OF ABEL AND ALSO OF ADELAIDE AND ALEXINA
The premiere of the opera Alexina B at the Liceu a few weeks ago (the second opera written by a woman, in this case Raquel García-Tomás, which has premiered in the entire history of the coliseum) aroused interest in the real figure that inspire. Adelaïde Herculin, categorized as a female at birth who ended her days as Abel Barbin, was the first intersex person on record to leave a written biography before committing suicide in 1868. The physician Ambrose Tardieu published that text, entitled My Memories and in 1985 an edition was made by Michel Foucault. Telling her story as a poor girl in a boarding school, her job as a governess, her falling in love with a young woman named Sara, and the invasive medical tests that ended up rebranding her as a man, Alexina/Abel's memoirs are quoted extensively in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. , and in The Disputed Gender, by Judith Butler. But the memoirs themselves had been out of print in Spanish for decades, so it's good news that the Barcelona publisher Temporal has just reissued them.
DISNEY AND THE PROBLEM OF 'COLORISM'
There is not a week without its casting controversy for reasons of cultural appropriation. The last one stars Sydney Agudong, the young actress who has been selected to play Nani, Lilo's sister, in the live action version of the animated film Lilo and Stitch that Disney is preparing. The company made a big point that Agudong is “native Hawaiian,” like sisters Nani and Lilo in the film, two dark-skinned orphans who scrape by working for the island's tourism industry. Although she is technically Hawaiian, because she grew up there, Agudong is of white Filipino origin and has a much lighter skin color than the original Nani, who is of Polynesian origin like the original inhabitants of the island. This already happened in an almost identical way in 2019 when the cast of the live-action version of Aladdin was announced and it turned out that Princess Jasmine was much whiter than in the drawings.
POP WITH SUBTITLES
Something is happening this year at Coachella, the festival that takes place over two weekends in the Nevada desert. When Bad Bunny, the headlining star of the first night, took the stage last week, she asked the crowd a rhetorical question: in English or in Spanish? The crowd responded and Benito Martínez Ocasio addressed the audience in the Puerto Rican language for the rest of the night. The following night it was Rosalía who announced "good night, Coachella" and put in the middle of her show the famous audio of her Catalan grandmother who appears in Motomami ("bon dia amor meu"). Two other headliners at Coachella were France's Angèle and Korea's Blackpink, and the crowd did their best to chant all those non-English lyrics, partly because they've trained by watching tik toks and videos with subtitles.
THE NUN WAS MISSING
Anna Karina, Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Indrid Bergman, Jodie Foster, Amy Adams. There is an unwritten rule in Hollywood that dictates that an actress is not fully consecrated until she includes a nun in her repertoire. Cate Blanchett is about to join the select club. In the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes this year, you can see The New Boy, Warwick Thornton's film in which the actress plays a rebellious nun in Australia in the forties who sees how the life of her convent is altered when they pick up an abandoned aboriginal child. Everything indicates that Blanchett will pass the habit test.
