Picture credit: silver bust sculpture of Tilda Swinton by Luca Guadagnino
(On Display Until March 15, 2026)
Dear Shaded Viewers,
March 12, 2026 words, pictures & film by Aidan Amore:
Allow me to suggest what could be your weekend’s worthy pretext to an escapade by train from Paris to Amsterdam and back. Though it wouldn’t be, as one might expect, to roam the famed Venice of the North, lulled by Mary Jane’s intoxicating scents across bricked lanes and charming canals, no.
Far more uncommon yet as stimulating for the senses, I would recommend a narcotic-free immersion of your eyes and ears within a multimedia installation: Tilda Swinton Ongoing, in its final week at the Eye Filmmuseum, right across the water by Amsterdam Centraal.
Picture credit: Tilda Swinton among a display of her wardrobe created with Olivier Saillard
Visitors, whether film, fashion, photography, or performance practitioners and enthusiasts alike, all are in for a trip across fourty years of retrospective, generously weaved in a self-portraying curatorial effort from Tilda Swinton herself, with contributions from the contemporary luminaries she has been blessed to count as intimate friends, notably : Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Derek Jarman, Jim Jarmusch, Sandro Kopp, Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Upon treading the web of this onsite recollection of spellbinding mementos, one inevitably first acknowledges Tilda’s vulnerable act of bravery for daring the public display of her most intimate vaults, laid accross a darkly vast hall resembling memory itself personified as an unexplored cave, accross which chiaroscuro beams favoured by the great masters have come to highlight the contours of select souvenirs, mysteriously emerging back to the surface…
Picture credit: detail of a silver photo print by Tim Walker of Tilda Swinton in her father’s military jacket
The spectacle thus offers the adventurous wanderers many treasures to behold: from magnetising cinematic capsules of rare unseen footage, through the towering silver photo prints conjuring up the ghostly appearances from an illustrous historical past, or the life-size replica of a former apartment erected as a frozen clepsydra in the way of age, to the finest wardrobe akin to a secret diary opened like an archeological worksite, serving the mission of instructing its public with what the sartorial language of garments has to reveal not only about their wearer, but also about their confectioner… as many floating pearls of timelessness united in a free-form embroidery by a voiceover dispensing inspiring “Notes for radical living”, rebounding at you from accross space with a soothing timber.
Picture credit: detail of the Raf Simmons sweater Tilda Swinton wore on the day she met Luca Guadagnino in 1994
Outloud, Tilda ponders. With her, visitors reflect on what she ackowledges to be the foundational value to her existence : collaboration, as the ongoing fertile ground one must lovingly tend to with great patience, to hope to bear witness of any artistic germination. Art history proves in her case that this practice has nurtured the development of a fantastical cultural estate, which stretches an unparallaled range finding its opposites in the two contradicting poles of mass entertainement and arthouse cinema, by way of unexpectedly varied appearances in family franchises such as Narnia and Marvel, or in experimental must-sees such as Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and Sally Potter’s Orlando.
Picture credit: “A bright horizon” eye portrait of Tilda Swinton by her partner Sandro Kopp
Regardless of the genre, to the one refuting to this day to call herself an “actress” the beginning of any expressive gesture is akin to planting a tree. It starts by the encounter between seed and soil, or in other terms Tilda and her creative mates, mixing their artistic gamets before the start of a gestation period reaching most times far beyond the 9 months expected to give birth to a human being. Perhaps, the best example of this state of fact is more than the decade it took Tilda and Apichatpong Weerasethakul to birth the magnificent, Memoria, which went on being graced by the Jury Prize during the 74th edition of the Festival de Cannes.
Regardless of the media, Tilda’s films, pictures, performances and art, are but organic by-products, branching out from a solid trunk finding its roots in horizontal friendships she has evenly shared as a co-creative investigator with her peers, rather then hierarchically reducing herself to mere executioner of a demiurgic director’s master plan. This singular process, which often sees her credited as an executive producer of the projects she part takes in, not only reminds us it takes ideally a respectful dialogue between two parents to consensually make a child, but also to raise it.
Even more importantly, the four decades of Tilda’s presence as a queer woman in our creative industries has stood as a quietly rebellious act of defiance against the questionable practices of tradition, in which it is too often times expected from models, actors, performers, and especially more so from females, to submissively give up their will power to show all signs of servitude to the vision of the almighty auteur, most often male.
Picture credit: still picture from Derek Jarman’s film “The last of England”, starring Tilda Swinton
As the ultimate shape-shifter, Tilda’s apparitions keep gracefully defying all norms, reminding us that the human condition stretches far beyond the transfixation of our genders and the geographies we come from. Man, woman, angel, mother, witch, monster, machine, common girl, queen or tyrant… it takes a firm “non-believer in identity” and a great “friend of chaos” (in her own terms) to masterfully demonstrate that our true essence resides in an identitiless spirit, animating us from underneath the skins we must regularly shed, if we hope to reivent ourselves in compliance with life’s sacred law: nothing lasts, everything changes…
Without a care for the expected role by which a woman should have let herself be defined, especially as she descended from an ancient Scottish aristocratic lineage with historical high ranks in the military, Katherine Matilda Swinton overcame the privilege of her own history in a queer act of dissidentification from it, thus coming in contact with a liberated voice as Tilda, which has never feared to use its reach to speak for the voiceless, the persecuted, the unwanted, most commonly frowned upon by the people of the noble ranks she originates from.
Wether familiar with Tilda Swinton’s unforgettable androgyny, or if they have yet to familiarise themselves with it, I’d reckon anyone with an ambition to fearlessly pursue the search of their authentic self would inevitably get their fair share of sensory delight by paying a visit to the Eye Filmmuseum this weekend, gently guided in their steps by Tilda’s notes for radical living:
MAKE FRIENDS WITH CHAOS\
HOLD A CALM MIND
LET THINGS SHAKE
FORGIVE HUMAN FRAILTY
CHAMPION SECOND CHANCES
DEFY UNKINDNESS
REVERENCE FELLOWSHIP
LISTEN TO THE QUIET
RESPECT THE YOUNG
SEEK GROWTH
TRUST IN CHANGE
TREASURE LEARNING
INSPIRE FAITH IN EVOLUTION
HOLD FAITH IN MIRACLES
LOOK BEYOND THE BINARY
BE WARY OF DOUBTLESS
HONOUR THE BRIGTHHEADED
GROW PLANTS
ATTEND TO THE WEATHER
BE ELECTRIC
CHERISH LANGUAGE
CELEBRATE SILENCE
DANCE DAILY
BLESS THE HANDMADE
MAGIC UP FRESH BEAUTY
SING INTO PAIN
FIND JOY IN SHADOW
CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS
FOLLOW THE WIND
LOOK UPWARDS
SWOON UNDER CLOUDS
FEEL YOUR COURAGE
FACE FORWARD
READ HISTORY
OPEN YOUR EARS
DROP YOUR SHOULDERS
BEND YOUR KNEES
RAISE THE ROOF
KEEP BREATHING
BE TRUSTWORTHY
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
BELIEVE IN GOODNESS
HEAD FOR THE LIGHT
© portrait by Beto Vargas
AIDAN AMORE
Cre__actor in film, music art & fashion.
