EUROPALIA ESPAÑA presents synchronised swimming as performance art
Dragon, rest your head on the seabed by Pablo Lilienfeld & Federico Vladimir — 12 October 2025, 5 pm & 8 pm — Swimming center Wezenberg
During the festival's opening week, EUROPALIA ESPAÑA is organising a unique performance at the iconic Wezenberg Olympic Swimming Centre in Antwerp, next to the DE SINGEL arts centre. It is in this unique setting that this choreography – balancing between dance, sport and speculative fiction – truly comes to life.
Dragon, rest your head on the seabed by artist duo Pablo Lilienfeld and Federico Vladimir is a performance featuring six synchronised swimmers in a spellbinding aquatic choreography. For nearly an hour, a dragon rises from the surface of the pool—stretching its claws, splashing, spitting, and bubbling in all its watery splendour.
By choosing a monstrous creature as its spiritual animal, the piece challenges the tidy codes of conformity. It flows against the tide of traditional artistic swimming, where athletes are penalised for not smiling, for stray hairs, or for touching the pool floor. This unruly dragon doesn’t always smile—and it doesn’t just touch the bottom, it rests there.
Dragon, rest your head on the seabed is the first instalment of the Dragon Pieces, a series of works initiated by the artist duo that fluctuate between monstrosity and transindividual fantasy. At its core, Dragon, rest your head on the seabed is also a celebration of interconnection. Staged in a swimming pool, the performance reminds us that we are water-bodies, fluid and permeable, bound together by the element we share. The dragon itself, constantly dissolving and reassembling, moves with the same shape-shifting nature as water.
The result is a world gloriously free of judgement—a space where sameness and difference, synchrony and discord, move together as parts of a single, shimmering whole.
Practical Information
Dragon, rest your head on the seabed
Organised by EUROPALIA ESPAÑA
Pablo Lilienfeld & Federico Vladimir
12 October 2025, 5 pm & 8 pm
In collaboration with City of Antwerp & DE SINGEL
Olympic swimming center Wezenberg, Antwerp
Video
Selection of Images
About EUROPALIA ESPAÑA
Founded in 1969, EUROPALIA is an international arts festival held every two years in Belgium, focusing on a different country or theme each edition. The festival presents a multidisciplinary programme spanning visual arts, performing arts, music, film, and literature, creating meaningful cultural exchanges between Belgium and featured countries.
Exactly forty years after a first edition in 1985, EUROPALIA ESPAÑA will unfold all over Belgium a multidisciplinary programme, from October 8, 2025, to February 1, 2026, uniting heritage and contemporary art forms and providing fascinating perspectives on themes that connect and challenge us all.
About Pablo Lilienfeld & Federico Vladimir
The work of the Spanish artist duo Pablo Lilienfeld and Federico Vladimir is deeply interwoven with their relationship, moving from intimacy to explorations of collectivity that challenge hegemonic ways of narrating the self. They often say to one another, “Narrarse es cuidarse”—“to narrate ourselves is to take care of each other.”
Through speculative fiction, Lilienfeld and Vladimir create and sustain worlds where the domestic, marginality, recreation, and desire converge. Their research on transindividual narratives encompasses practices as diverse as synchronized swimming, raving, and role-playing games. In performances, videos, and installations, they collaborate with relatives, friends, lovers, viruses, ghosts, and other companions.