A book is a perfect sculpture, a beautiful volume where time passes by. [Allen Ruppersberg]
A group of people have been reading a book together for thirty years. They have been reading it again and again, with each journey from the first to the last page taking eleven years. Once they arrive at the last word, a very enigmatic "the", they begin again with the first word "riverrun". The text appears inexhaustible, its interpretation endless, the inconclusive nature of the reading exciting. The world seems to cease existing outside this reading room, or, perhaps, it exists because of it. [From the back page of The Joycean Society catalogue]
It is important to understand that Finnegans Wake is not a crossword but it is something meant to enjoy the reading of, you don't have to translate it into the normal language, this is a mistake that makes many people give up and this is why it is a perfect metaphore...it is an artwork. In the sense that as an artist soon or later you have to answer this question: what do you want to say? I don't understand what you want to say..I don't understand what this work is about...which for an artist is really discouraging because if you really could say in a straight way you would say in straight words...[Dora Garcia]
The vaporetto stops on the waterfront of the Giudecca, Palanca stop. On the other bank of the canal, Dorsoduro.
This long narrow island seems to be one of the most "genuine" experience of daily life you can ask to Venice. We went there to meet artist Dora Garcia and see her last film, The Joycean Society, a portrait of a book club dedicated to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the most difficult book ever, the never ending book, which reading is cyclic and infinite as the Torah's.
Dora Garcia, The Joycean Society, video still, 2013.
About the conquest of time through the act of reading as a political act, about the relationship between James Joyce, Trieste, Freud, Jung and the psychoanalysis, the story of a book that contains everything, the life itself, about the story of a group of connoisseurs and readers who have been reading that same book for almost thirty years...that is what we talked about with Dora Garcia, an artist whose work is mainly concerned with the exploration of the slippages between functional communication and deviant systems of interpretation, with the investigation of the political potential rooted in marginal positions, with the relationships between language and mental disorders, between institutions and radicalism.
Dora Garcia, The Joycean Society, video still, 2013.