A new season for a new era The 2021-2022 season opens this quarter with all the Centre’s services back in action and a diverse programming line-up. This will undoubtedly be one of our most important reopenings and I believe we are in a good position, in the "pole position", to kick off this new season. Our 2019-2023 Project Programme has passed the halfway mark at a complicated time. As the Centre’s attendance has practically returned to 2019 levels, more and more people are discovering what is going on inside the Alhóndiga through the experience of culture. We want to show what's behind the walls of each building. Continuing with our roadmap to connect society and contemporary culture, we have planned an annual programme that includes the start of Roma Akademia, the most extensive artistic exhibition organised to date in terms of its artistic and spatial dimensions. This exhibition brings together the works and projects of 45 artists in residence in 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, ranging from painting to photography, industrial design, film and audio-visuals, architecture, theatre, literature, fashion and restoration. The exhibition occupies most of the Centre’s spaces including the Exhibition Hall, Lantegia, laboratory of ideas, the Mediateka and the Atrium. This event will be followed in 2022 by the exhibition of the Cabello/Carceller group on the history of gender construction, curated by the philosopher Paul B. Preciado. In addition, the Centre is producing an audio-visual exhibition titled Somewhere from here to heaven 6
curated by the specialist Garbiñe Ortega, which showcases a constellation of filmmakers from different generations such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ben Rivers, Ana Vaz or Eduardo "Teddy" Williams, inspired by the universe of Bruce Baillie, the "essential" filmmaker of the 60s/70s, who died in 2020. We will also be showing the Premature Architectures of the conceptual artist, Isidoro Valcárcel, in Lantegia October also marks the start of eszenAZ, the performing arts season, which includes the shows that will be part of the 12th Conference on Social Inclusion in the Performing Arts to be held at the Centre in November. These events focus on artistic and social diversity as envisaged through hybrid views of the contemporary scene. The return of cinema has been one of the most important milestones of the cultural reactivation in recent months and Azkuna Zentroa is the point of reference in Bilbao. The season begins with Zinemaldia, which has been reinforced this year, in collaboration with the San Sebastian Festival, to offer more films and matinees for children and family audiences. This will be followed by the Zinemateka monographic series on Jean-Pierre Melville, the greatest exponent of French polar cinema; and the Bilbao contests that are headquartered in our Centre, such as Zinebi, the Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival; Film Sozialak, the International Invisible Film Festival; Zinemakumeak gara!, the Women's Film Festival; and of course the regular line-up of the Golem Alhóndiga cinemas.
