Otello 1887

A film based on Otello by Giuseppe Verdi, an opera created at La Scala, Milan, in 1887. This film was shot at the Palacio de Cristal de Madrid in the exhibition Splendide-Hotel.

Otello 1887 is a cinematic opera co-produced by the Museo Reina Sofía. The work represents an epilogue to Splendide-Hotel, a site-specific project the artist realised for the Palacio de Cristal in 2014. The installation depicted the accumulation of a series of moments hailing from 1887: the Palacio de Cristal was built to exhibit the plants and flowers that were sent from the Philippines, a Spanish colony at that time; Freud could be found penning his theory of psychoanalysis; and it was the year that Marcel Duchamp was born. The period, a priori with no great relevance to the origins of modernity, saw a tired European culture always questioning itself.