Dora Garcia

I started working as an artist at the end of the 90s, on what was to be called years later delegated per-formance. My Delegated Performances were perfor-mances where actors (not in the professional sense but in the sense that they carried out an action) developed a very simple script in public space, with an unknowing audience, who took part in the action without being aware of its scripted nature. I took the role of a director who had started a narra-tive without wanting to control it, but rather look-ing forward to being surprised by it. Such a par-ticular way of working in performance demanded a different way of documenting it, which adopted the form of on-line diaries written by the perform-ers, and from these on-line diaries my first films started to develop. The first films, The Breathing Lesson, 2001, The Glass Wall, 2002, were very close to video performance, but soon began to be linked to long processes of research into notions of con-trol, freedom, truth, fiction, metafiction, scripted and non-scripted behavior.

Since 2006, I have developed texts, installations and films on the GDR Political police, the film Rooms, Conversations, 24’, 2006, first presented at GfZK, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany, on the comedian Lenny Bruce Just because everything is different... Lenny Bruce in Sydney, one-time performance, Sydney Bien-nale, 2008, on the rhizomatic associations of antipsychiatry, Mad Marginal book series since 2010, and The Deviant Majority, film, 34’, 2010, part of her performance project The Inadequate, first presented at the Spanish Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale. I have used classical TV formats to research Germany’s most recent history, Die Klau Mich Show, Documenta 13, 2012, frequented Finnegans Wake reading groups, The Joycean Society, 53’, 2013, created meeting points for voice hearers, The Hearing Voices Café, since 2014, and researched the crossover between performance and psychoanalysis, The Sinthome Score, 2013, and Segunda Vez, 2018.

Segunda Vez was a film project comprising 4 films: El Helicóptero (2015), To induce the spirit of the image, 2016, La Eterna, 2017, Segunda vez, 44’, 2016, and Segunda Vez, 2018. It entailed a long research process on performance, publics, metafictions, politics and psychoanalysis, using the figure of the Argentinian Oscar Masotta, psychoanalyst and author, as read thread.

Since 2018, I have been developing a film and text project on the legacy of October revolution-ary Alexandra Kollontai, understanding her as a visionary figure of what has been called inter-sectional feminism. This legacy is being told in two chapters: one, what has been hidden and revealed of her in the Moscow archives, and two, the “print communities” created around the translation of her texts into Spanish, since the 30s until today. This project is set to be completed in 2022, and it is around this project and its processes that I plan to work with the students of Le Fresnoy.

Dora García