The 'Collages' of the 'Imposter' Isabel Coixet

“I feel like an absolute imposter, but I am comfortable being one,” Isabel Coixet (Sant Adrià de Besòs, 65 years old) remarked yesterday at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The reason? The filmmaker, known for films such as 'My Life Without Me', 'Map of the Sounds of Tokyo', and the recent 'A Love', based on Sara Mesa's novel, was presenting 'Learning in Disobedience', an exhibition curated by Estrella de Diego featuring fifty collages, part of the PhotoEspaña 2025 programme, on display from today until September 14.

'Learning in Disobedience' encompasses a wide range: from a self-portrait titled 'You Were An Accident', a digital collage from an accidental photograph taken with her mobile phone, which she describes as an “anti-selfie”, to the subtle irony of 'Finally, Everyone Had Taken a Picture of Everything'.

Indeed, Coixet believes that the explosion of social media and the “overdose of photos that overwhelm us” led her to stop taking photographs and turn towards paper and photo collages, an artistic facet she began exploring about fifteen years ago. In this collection of fifty pieces, the Catalan director works with a variety of media and techniques, ranging from digital to canvas, paper, foam board, and hardboard, although most of the works displayed at the Thyssen date from 2021 to 2024. These works, the museum notes, connect with the great avant-garde tradition of the genre—from Hanna Höch to Kurt Schwitters—and link Coixet to a certain precariousness, a way of working with little that she also pursues in her films.

The collaboration between Coixet and the museum began to take shape over a year ago when this new facet of the creator of 'The Secret Life of Words' reached the ears of Guillermo Solana, the museum's artistic director, who was interested in seeing her works. “My great aspiration was for them to make postcards with them,” Coixet recalled yesterday about the day she arrived at the cultural facility with a folder full of those works.

The curator was the mastermind behind the title, 'Learning in Disobedience', a name with which the director says she fully identifies, as she believes it has been “the axis” of her life. Although Coixet avoided making comparisons with her films, De Diego emphasized that her collages have much in common with her movies “because she takes everyday things and displaces them from their place.”

“I believe that collage is the way to appropriate things that leave you indifferent, which are the spaces between things. The cut-outs are not what we are cutting out, but what remains around,” stated the winner of eight Goya Awards and the 2020 National Cinematography Award in the press release announcing the project.