Never have we, non-Miu Miu related, seen the beautiful space of the Palais d’Iéna – headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council, as well as a regular location for Miu Miu runway shows – like this: vast, light, and open, filled with small, several simultaneously happening performance installations, accompanied by Miu Miu’s runway pieces worn by the performers. “Tales & Tellers” is a body of work  conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, to celebrate a dialogue with female artists as part of a profound and loving understanding of a woman’s life. Macuga, a Polish multidisciplinary artist working with historical and archival research, constantly questions historiography, political and institutional structures. She has worked for globally renowned museums such as MoMA New York, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. She is also the mastermind behind Miu Miu’s last show’s art intervention, a newspaper called “The Truthless Times”, imagining truth as something radical, and the news as a form of mental and linguistic acrobatics. Dyangani’s work focuses on new forms of environment and platforms created by artists in the absence of conventional institutions and contexts.

To bring together the aspects female perspective, culture, and fashion, Miu Miu had already launched the Women’s Tales in 2011 to provide a platform for female filmmakers. The first commission in the Women’s Tales series was The Powder Room by Zoe Cassavetes, shot in 2011, and this conversation has been integrated into the biannual Miu Miu runway shows in Paris. Now, all these pieces have come together.

Working with the conceptual idea that a story can change minds, alter courses, shift lives, and provide us a new understanding of the world – whether trough a hero or an anti-hero – each story and teller reflects on our society with the most beautiful diversity. Real-life actors – selected by Macuga and Dyangani Ose – reinterpret characters from various films and artistic inventions commissioned by Miu Miu over the past 15 years, alongside video projection of the original film. The vast space of the Palais d’Iéna was filled with so much life, based on the physical retellings of fragments of the stories alongside the originals shown in the auditorium. 28 short films by directors including Chloë Sevigny, Agnès Varda, Miranda July, and Naomi Kawase, had the observer facing totally different scenarios, presented on iPads or TV monitors fixed to cages and sun loungers, while others moved on skateboards – an extension of perceptions of the Middle East in Haifaa Al-Mansour’s The Wedding Singer. All these elements share sometimes confusing identities and narratives. Theater and opera director Fabio Cherstich directed the performative fragments, creating a sense of them as separate entities but also as a harmonious whole, putting them all together, switching from screen to real life. A connecting bridge was also a newspaper based on Macuga’s work, featuring QR codes linking to informative texts exploring authorship and identity, as presented in the exhibition.

Between stories like “Tourist Reach Terminus at Last Resort” by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez and “Desire Is a Pain for Honest Dreamers”, remembering cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, various themes leave us with mixed feelings but also – and that is most important – with a painful optimism that seeks more exchange, understanding, and a more solid foundation for a better future. What else is there to say? Miuccia Prada did it again, continuing the innovative, profound, and forward-thinking art conversation she initiated with her work for the Fondazione Prada since 1995.  “Hopefully, it will inspire other platforms to also create places for women to have a continuation in speaking and dealing with their issues”, Dyangani said in an interview. Fact is, there are tons of topics and experiences untouched that will open many new doors for a brighter future.