The paradox of Rosalía’s bed | Opinion

The first interview I saw in which Rosalía spoke Lux She appeared lying on Mar Vallverdú’s bed. I would never have imagined that gesture of intimacy in the podcasts Radio Boredom would be crucial in the campaign marketing from his latest album. Since that speech, Rosalía’s bed has followed me everywhere. I unlock the phone screen and there she is, Rosalía writhing in her bed and transforming into a dove in the video clip of Berghain. Rosalía contemplative in front of 900 people between XXL sheets, presiding over the oval room of the MNAC. Rosalía, tells Xavi Sancho The weekly country who never sits down and can only work while lying in bed. Rosalia, singing The Pearl on the various mattresses on the Jimmy Fallon show. Rosalía’s bed is the great paradox of our time: its sacred space of creation and performance It is the unattainable temple for a society dying of sleep.

It is no coincidence that the spiritual mystique of Lux Do not lie on the sofa, but on a female bed. That place where we go to let ourselves go has become the aesthetic symbol of those who have educated themselves sentimentally on the Internet. I’m talking about the exhausted girls who fantasized about emulating the protagonist of My year of rest and relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, to spend 12 months horizontally, snoozing and watching 80s movies. Women who are Olympic champions of Bed, a very popular anglicism on the networks that is used to describe the pleasure that comes from “rotting in bed”, or, what is the same thing, lying down for hours doing nothing but eating screen. Rosalía is the opposite of those emaciated bodies whose attention is broken by the attempt to reach everything. In his bed, instead of getting sad, he purifies himself. Just listen to how he openly acknowledges the privilege of having a year to think about his lyrics while leaning on his pillow. Her bed will never be the same as that of others, but how intelligent the Catalan was in appropriating that symbol as venerated as it is rare. The possibility of stopping, this is the exclusive luxury of our time.

Collecting the memetic pulse of the networks, on display The bed doesn’t ask questions (“The bed asks no questions”), which can be seen at the Panoràmic festival until next Sunday, the essayist Juan Evaristo Valls and the cultural researcher Estela Ortiz reflect on the idea of ​​the bed in a much more touching way. From The roomChantal Akerman’s 11-minute short film with double 360-degree panoramic view, recorded in bed in her inappropriate room, establishes a dialogue between artistic works and actions of recent years to ask which bodies have access to rest. In a society where sleep is the bastion that best resists the predatory invasion of capitalist profitability, rest has become a scarce good because it does not pay off in the dictatorship of the always available, always connected. The bed, here, seen as a symbol of resistance.

Every time someone else attacks me coil of Rosalía ethereal between white sheets and as pure as her wedding dresses, I remember the bed with which the artist Tracey Emin irritated the critics in 1999. In My bedexhibited at the Tate in 1998 and shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, Emin featured a bed with dirty sheets, empty bottles, used condoms, a pregnancy test, dried vomit, cigarette butts everywhere and underwear stained with menstrual blood. More than applause, the work, which was later sold for almost three million euros and revolutionized everything, caused a schism in rather thoughtful and puritanical England. She was a prophetess of all. The patron saint of bedrot.