Dora García: Conosco un labirinto che è una linea retta

Curated by Angel Moya Garcia.

Duplication, reflection, the difference between certainty and illusion together with the fantastic breaking into reality all show just how tricky it is to make a clear distinction between the three realms of subjectivity (the registers postulated by the psychic Lacan: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real) in order to reconstruct an objective world. J. L. Borges’ tale Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which inspired the title of the project, is a glaring example of that because it is the story of a conceptual apocalypse. The plot tracks an anonymous author’s research into the mystery surrounding the region of Uqbar, whose literature possesses a blatantly fantastic register with some of the stories set in an imaginary land called Tlön. Tlön is a fiction within a fiction, the idea yearned for by a distant mind inhabiting an undefined realm, yet in the end it appears in the real world and subverts it. While the plot may be labyrinthine, it is nevertheless made up of humans and is “fated to be deciphered by humans.” The truth about our imagination is revealed: we thrive on it. Social conventions, identities, history, indeed any fact which we consider objective is in reality arranged by the weaving of the imagination.

The stories of Dora García (b. Valladolid, Spain, 1965; she lives and works in Oslo), characterised by a summary script and an open ending, probe the impact of language, literature, translation and the subconscious on social constructions and identities. Her work revolves around the ongoing negotiation between speaker and listener, between author and reader, between actor and audience, while at the same time forging an ambivalence between fiction and spontaneous event, analysing the sense of the border between reality and representation.

The Conosco un labirinto che è una linea retta project, developed by the artist in Pavilions 9A and 9B at the Mattatoio di Roma and curated by Angel Moya Garcia, focuses on the notions of event, duration and repetition. The two pavilions mirror one another, doubling up through labyrinthine narrative and psychoanalysis, unfolding in a binary setting—on the one hand a projection, on the other a series of performances—like two paths that fork and rejoin only through active observation which invites the visitor not to consider indifference as a feasible option, and to consciously decide whether to enter into a situation or to shirk it.

Pavilion 9A will be occupied by the screening of the film Segunda Vez. The film mingles politics, psychoanalysis and performance, orbiting around the figure of Oscar Masotta, the man who masterminded the dissemination of Lacan’s thought in Spanish-speaking countries and a key theoretician of the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s. Pavilion 9B, on the other hand, will be engaged for the entire duration of the project by a series of delegated performances that will alternate and interweave, using the entire area of the pavilion as an arena thanks to a series of drawings on the floor that articolate the sequences, determine the place where the performances take place and define their own space even when they are inactive.

This new project of the three-year Sensitive Devices programme whisks us off into a mysterious and fascinating dimension. A labyrinth that is a straight line of seeming digressions and allusions where symmetry and disorder compose a design whose outlines we discover through time, duration and repetition. It is an attempt to replace the memory in as much as we repeat what we refuse to remember, a nod to the fragile nature of existence and an allusion to the ceaseless signs that we refuse to see or to interpret and that prompt us to eternally repeat history.