La Quinta del Sordo

A special screening bracketed by a live cello performance, Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo imagines an “invisible space”: the house outside Madrid, now destroyed, where Francisco Goya created his “Black Paintings” between 1819 and 1824. Using cutting-edge technologies in collaboration with the cinematographer Darius Khondji, editor Ael Dallier Vega, sound designer Nicolas Becker, and pioneering DJ and music producer Lexx, Parreno observes the Black Paintings (now at the Prado museum) in hypnotic, luminous detail, and evokes the aural and spatial environment in which Goya created them as a man in his seventies, when he was ill, deaf, and living in seclusion from the royal court. It was, as Parreno conveys in this work of uncanny science fiction, an “apocalyptic time,” one that had recently witnessed the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the massive eruption of an Indonesian volcano that triggered a change in the global climate.