From tomorrow until 20 October, Room 1 of the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid presents the exhibition Madrid, an Almodóvar girl.
In this exhibition, visitors will witness the evolution of Madrid and its society through Pedro Almodóvar’s films, and vice versa, thanks to the constant dialogue between the capital and the director. As he himself states, ‘I grew up, enjoyed, suffered, got fat and developed in Madrid. And many of these things I did at the same pace as the city”.
Almodóvar has not only captured hundreds of the city’s settings in his films, but also its soul, drawing inspiration from the people and stories he has met there, from Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) to Madres paralelas (2021).
‘I have always found in this city a perfect landscape and an incorrect and ideal fauna for each of my films’, said the director. Madrid is the true Almodóvar girl, appearing to a greater or lesser extent in all his films, in such a way that she is the quintessential character of the Almodóvarian universe.
It is very appropriate that this exhibition is being held in Conde Duque, as one of the most iconic scenes in his filmography was shot on the façade of the building. Susan Sontag said that, like the scene of Marilyn and the skirt, the mythical moment of the hose watering Carmen Maura in The Law of Desire (1987) has remained in the collective subconscious, and is now recovered almost forty years later.
