The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) is keeping Villa Paloma open into the evening three times this summer, with free access to its Victor Brauner exhibition, food and drink in the garden, and an open-air screening of a Palme d’Or winner’s most recent film.
The nocturnes run on Thursday 23rd July and Thursday 20th August, from 6pm to 9pm. On both evenings, Monaco Vinalia Gourmet will serve food and drinks at Régulus, and admission to Victor Brauner, L’Aventure magique will be free throughout.
A film in the garden
The centrepiece of the programme falls between the two, on Thursday 6th August. The evening follows the same pattern — Régulus open from 6pm, free entry to the Brauner exhibition until 9pm — before the garden turns into an outdoor cinema at 9pm for a screening of Memoria.
Released in 2021, the film is the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and stars Tilda Swinton alongside Elkin Díaz and Jeanne Balibar. Swinton plays a Scottish horticulturist specialising in orchids who travels to Bogotá to visit her ailing sister. During her stay she strikes up friendships with a French archaeologist overseeing a construction project and a young local musician, all while being pursued by a mysterious and deafening sound that nobody else can hear.
What follows is less a narrative than an immersion — a slow, sensory walk through the Colombian jungle in which image and sound bleed into one another, and which places Weerasethakul firmly in the lineage of the Surrealists. That connection gives the screening an obvious logic alongside the Brauner exhibition upstairs.
Weerasethakul shared the Jury Prize at Cannes for Memoria, 11 years after winning the Palme d’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the first Thai film to take the festival’s top prize. Memoria runs for 136 minutes and will be screened in its original version with French subtitles.
Attendance is free but places must be booked in advance by emailing public@nmnm.mc.
The pavilion that cooks by sunlight
Régulus itself is worth arriving early for. The semicircular brick pavilion was created by architect and artist Guillaume Aubry and inaugurated by Princess Caroline of Hanover in July 2024, built along the original lines of Villa Paloma’s antique garden, laid out in 1913 by the landscape architect Octave Godard. It faces due south and follows the sun across the day, with a solar oven at its centre that heats and cooks what is served at the counter. The museum describes it as neither a café nor a cocktail bar nor an agora, but something of all three.
Brauner until January
The exhibition runs until 3rd January 2027 and brings together more than 160 paintings, drawings and sculptures tracing Victor Brauner’s career from the 1920s to the 1960s, drawn from a private collection assembled in Monaco. Ten non-Western objects once owned by the artist, on loan from the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, sit alongside them, with a scenography by Christophe Martin.
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Main photo: Régulus, photo source NMNM