The upcoming Tilda Swinton performance, titled House of Gestures, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on 5–6 June 2026, transforming the Frank Gehry-designed atrium into a space of silent storytelling.
Created in collaboration with Dom Pérignon and co-conceived with curator Olivier Saillard, the two-day performance explores how gesture, costume, and presence can carry narrative in place of language.
Dom Pérignon: where wine, place, and artistic creation intersect
Central to the project is a long-standing dialogue with Dom Pérignon and its guiding ethos, Creation is an eternal journey, previously extended through collaborations with Karl Lagerfeld, David Lynch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Takashi Murakami. Here, that lineage shifts from object-making toward live performance, aligning champagne with embodied expression.
Vincent Chaperon, Dom Pérignon’s chef de cave, describes wine as a meeting point between landscape and emotion—an idea echoed throughout the work, where space takes on emotional depth and gesture holds memory.
‘House of Gestures’: a silent choreography of memory and identity
On stage, Tilda Swinton moves through an empty space using only gesture and changing costumes to suggest shifting identities and emotional states. With no spoken text, meaning emerges through movement, while clothing acts as fragmented narrative.
The work extends Swinton’s ongoing exploration of performance as a fluid, unstable form. Earlier projects such as A Biographical Wardrobe and her collaboration with Olivier Saillard at the Fondation Cartier also treated garments as carriers of memory and biography.
Here, gesture becomes both archive and invention, shaped in real time in front of the audience.
Photography courtesy of DOM PÉRIGNON
