foto: Talia Romero

We are trying out from on tomorrow a guided tour per day, in English and Spanish, at 12:00 pm. First there will be a general introduction to the project and then there will be a more detailed and informal tour to each of the archive rooms. This is made thanks to the very generous collaboration of the AECID interns in the pavilion- and I am very thankful to them!

Also, please mind that on Friday 8th July 11:00 we will enjoy de visit of Maurizio Lazzaratto, to talk with me and with Marco Baravalle on the very fundamental, but what a shame almost forgotten, Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles.

As well, to give you a taste of the guided tour, this is the draft we wrote today together with the interns:

I

The fundamental idea of The Inadequate, the project occupying the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is to turn around the traditional function of a national pavilion- to show the excellence of the arts of a certain country- and instead use the pavilion as a place for research of the actual context where this pavilion is placed.

“The Inadequate” (the marginal, the dissident, the radical, the abnormal) is a constant issue in the work of Dora García, and here it is used as a starting point from which to research the Italian cultural scene.

The Inadequate is an extended performance, initiated by Dora García and counting more than 80 performers. It is made of objects, conversations, monologues, theatre, silences and debate. The protagonists of this multiple, collective performance, spanning several generations, with a strong accent in the Italian scene as an object of research, are experts in the notion of ‘inadequacy’. They represent independent, underground, dissident, unofficial, marginal and exiled positions.

The performance and its archive evolve each day of the Biennial, and last the whole duration of it, 6 months. The program of this performance can be consulted at the entrance on the poster, in the performance guide, and in the internet site theinadequate.net.

II

The pavilion consist of three parts: the central stage, where most of the chapters of the performance happen; three large rooms with an archive, and two projection rooms.

The three rooms with archives are two traditional archive rooms and a room occupied by the work “Instant Narrative” (Dora García, 2006).

III

The reason of the presence of this work, “Instant Narrative”, is that, being impossible to record all the complexity of the performance, Dora García has chosen “Instant Narrative” to be the only documentation of the performance The Inadequate. Instant Narrative consists of an observer writing on her laptop everything she perceives during all the opening hours of the pavilion, creating an infinite text that is archived in the memory of the laptop.

So Instant Narrative is the text archive of The Inadequate.

IV

In the two lateral rooms, there is an archive of objects and documents. What links them together is the use they have in the performance. All the objects you see in this archive have been used by or are a reference for one of the 45 chapters of the performance.

The archive is organized around:

– Three points: the sliced book Ulysses (Dora García 1999), the series of objects “The Beggar’s Things” (Dora García, 2007) and the book “Teatro dell Mostre”, related to the exhibition with the same name held at Galeria Tartaruga in Rome in 1968. Same as in this pavilion, each day of that exhibiton a different artist took the stage.

– Four artists, fundamental in relation to the idea of “Inadequacy” in the italian art scene: Gianfranco Baruchello, Fabio Mauri, Francesco Matarrese, and Emilio Prini.

– Four writers: Robert Walser, James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Roberto Bazlen.

V

And then we have the projection rooms. In these two rooms there are two videos, complementary but independent. The first one was filmed in 2010 and the second in 2011, specifically for this presentation.

The Deviant Majority (from Basaglia to Brazil) follows the path of Venezian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, from the Law he managed to promote, elliminating psychiatric hospital and the concept of social dangerousness, to his travel to Brazil and the particular revolution happening there. In the second video, The Inadequate (Joyce, Psychoanalisis, Trieste), we turn back from São Paulo to Trieste to follow the birth of Leopold Bloom and Ulysses, modelled after the writer Italo Svevo and the background of the psychoanalisis coming from Vienna.

We can now go through a description of the different objects in the vitrines.

While we wait for Charles Filch to come we entertain ourselves with “The Artist Without Works” and “Rehearsal/ retrospective”. Of course “Instant Narrative” is a continuum, of which we are going to start publishing the first fascicles. I am sure you are all looking forward to that.

Charles Filch could only come from on the 11th, and besides that, this month we only wait for the visit of Mr. Lazzarato – who will speak with me about the very great, and very forgotten by many, Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles. François Tosquelles, since he spent most of his exiled life in France – he was the chief psychiatrist of the Republican army, civil war.

While we wait for Charles Filch, I feel the need to lick my wounds of artist in the Pavilion and I’ll do so in the comfort of this blog which I know so few people read: my husband, Martín the web designer, and that’s about it. So I will allow myself some liberties. Since most of my grudges are provoked by the Spanish press, I will continue in Spanish.

Todo parece residir en una serie de profundos malentendidos.

Cuando se ocupa este espacio, “El Pabellón” (que por razones de sonoridad y por las reminiscencias fálicas que empieza a tener para mí, comienzo a llamar desde hace unas semanas “El Pollón”) hay dos grandes malentendidos:

uno, que se representa a España (¿Pero a quién en España? ¿A sus artistas, a sus obreros, a la aristocracia, a la periferia, a todas sus regiones, a todas sus ciudades, a su historia, a su contemporaneidad, a su arte, a sus aeropuertos, a sus escuelas, qué es, permítaseme que me ponga en plan, qué cosa es España?)

y dos, que todo lo que se hace aquí se hace con dinero público y por tanto todo el mundo tiene derecho a opinar si se ha gastado bien o mal. Sin duda olvidan que en “España” casi todo en cultura se hace con dinero público, pero como ese dinero se filtra a través de instituciones o museos, a quien se insulta es a esas instituciones, y no como aquí, directamente al artista, como si fuera un muñeco de pim-pam-pum.

Además, he observado que profesiones a las que consideraba mejor informadas – los periodistas- parecen no tener ni idea de cómo se hace un presupuesto para un acontecimiento que ha de durar seis meses, con muchas personas que trabajan en ello (100 exactamente, incluyendo guardas, actores, coordinadores), con una publicación, con seguros, transportes, publicidad, préstamos, prensa, envíos – es una oficina que tiene que durar seis meses. Pero en fin, no nos perdamos en casuísticas.

España, pues, y el dinero público, son las dos razones por las que muchos te odian ya nada más cruzar la puerta del “P…llón”. Después, lo que haya dentro poco importa, siempre habrá razones para encontrarlo mal o bien. Se ha dicho que era una enorme pérdida de tiempo y de dinero. ¿Cómo se pierde el tiempo? muchos años llevo preguntándome cómo perder el tiempo, sin conseguirlo. En cuanto a perder el dinero, el dinero no se pierde, solo se transforma – puedo asegurar que ningún dinero se ha perdido aquí, todo ha ido a parar a alguna parte.

Otro prestigioso crítico (me he dado cuenta que en los periódicos españoles o hispanoparlantes nunca se pone la palabra “crítico” sin poner por delante “prestigioso”) me ha llamado imbécil. Mira, eso puedo aceptarlo. Por de pronto, la categoría de imbecilidad no me parece la peor en la que puede uno encontrarse. Como Carmelo Bene, considero que ser imbécil y abrir la boca lo suficiente puede permitirme el vuelo. De modo que no, imbécil no me ofende.

Sin embargo, mucho más me ha molestado – y sorprendido- que me llamen cínica. Para mi sorpresa, resulta que muchos han entendido que cuando hablo de “Lo Inadecuado” me refiero a mi condición particular. Como la Santísima Virgen, se me ha aparecido el “P…llón” y yo he dicho “no soy digna”. Y ahí es donde soy cínica – porque todo el mundo sabe que soy dignísima, que vivo para trepar, que solo he vivido pensando en el “P…llón” en los últimos años, y que finjo azoramiento como una prostituta finge virginidad.

En mi imbecilidad quizás no me había dado cuenta de cómo había ascendido hasta llegar a convertirme en segura candidata para el P…llón -tengan ustedes (ustedes, los que no leen este texto) presente que vivía en el extranjero desde hace veinte años, lo que explica también de paso que tenga trato con oscuros circuitos internacionales-.

Debido a esta mi condición de extranjería pues nunca pensé que tuviera que representar a España ni que tuviera que justificar su gasto público.

Pero, es que la descripción “Inadecuado” no se refiere a mí- y una la verdad se sorprende de tener que explicar algo tan obvio.

La idea de este proyecto está imagino suficientemente explicada en el “intro” de theinadequate.net (¿alguien ha pensado en leer la nota de prensa antes de escribir un artículo, al menos un artículo en que se llama cínico al artista?)

Cito:

{«Lo Inadecuado» es una performance extendida hecha de objetos, conversaciones, monólogos, teatro, silencios y debates. Los protagonistas de esta performance múltiple y colectiva, que proceden de varias generaciones y se ocupan preferentemente de la escena cultural italiana como objeto de investigación, son expertos en la idea de Inadecuación. Los protagonistas de «Lo Inadecuado» representan posiciones independientes, underground, disidentes, no oficiales, marginales, exiliadas.}

Es decir,no estoy hablando de mí. Hay artistas por aquí en los Giardini que hablan de Estambul, otros de las olimpiadas, yo puedo, si me da la gana, hablar de Lo Inadecuado. Eso no define a nadie como turco, ni como atleta, ni como inadecuado.

En todo lo que se ha escrito (en español) sobre el P…llón, sorprende que hay cosas aquí que nunca han sido mencionadas, signos que se han pasado por alto inexplicablemente.

– Mi nombre no está en ninguna parte en el P…llón. No hay absolutamente nada en las paredes del P…llón- no hay vinilos, no hay logos, no hay título. ¿No se le ha ocurrido pensar a nadie que esto puede significar algo?

– A nadie se le ha ocurrido comentar que en este P…llón se encuentran los siguientes tesoros: un dibujo de Fernand Deligny; los microscripts de Robert Walser; cinco obras de Fabio Mauri; la colección completa de películas de Alberto Grifi, junto a películas de Alice Guareschi, ; una obra original de Gianfranco Baruchello; el archivo de “sensibili alle foglie”- una colección de arte y una editorial iniciada dentro de las cárceles de seguridad en Italia; reproducciones del museo Svevo/Joyce de Trieste; obras de artistas del “museo de arte italiano in esilio”; una obra original de Emilio Prini! ; la famosa maleta roja de Uffici per l’Immaginazione Preventiva;- y en fin es obviamente un archivo de lo más florido de la escena disidente Italiana. Todo esto se ha pasado por alto, nadie ha pensado que era un archivo, nadie ha pensado a qué se refería este archivo. ¿Cómo es posible? No es una exposición, y por tanto nunca podrá ser juzgada como una exposición porque no lo es.

– Curiosamente, nadie ha hablado de dos videos que se proyectan aquí, salvo para decir -no cito textualmente pero era algo así- “muestra unos vídeos sobre internos en un hospital psiquiatrico” – claro, como “Otelo” va sobre una que perdió un pañuelo…

En fin, esto es un work in progress, seguirá este post: seguirá, y se modificará, y quizás, desaparezca.

Today on the stage: Cesare Pietroiusti, Nicola Valentino, Maria Rita Prette, myself, and artist Rosella Biscotti.

This morning as usual, 10:00, an enormous flow of visitors, punctual as always, comes in. I am busy organizing our new vitrine with the treasures, in the format of colour photocopies, that Daniela Rossi and Bianca Tosatti brought last Thursday. Wonderful works by Horst Ademeit, Rino Ferrari, Antonello Stupino and others.

However, as I was extremely busy fighting my way among crowds of visitors, a specially angry middle-aged -or perhaps just aged, gentleman, started to insistently talk to me in Italian:

– ” Who is responsible for this? who wrote these lies?? you cannot print those things!”

I thought, another too passionate member of the audience – I told him I was busy, we’d talk later. Surprise when he comes back carrying almost by the hand Mrs. M.S.,  the main coordinator of the Biennale. I start listening to him more attentively:

– “You cannot print those lies. In Italy, since the fall of fascism, there have been no political prisoners. No political prisoners, just criminals. Terrorists. Italy is a democracy”

I dawned on me then that he referred to the label attached to the archive of Sensibili alle foglie, very specifically their “Dreams of Prisoners”, Dreams that had been collected and edited by “political prisoners during the 80’s”- according to the label provided by Sensibili alle foglie themselves.

– “I will correct that immediately, sir. I am on my way to buy tippex and cover those offending words, “political”, I will just leave “prisoners”. is that ok?”

He seemed to relax. I just remember the words of my friend (?) Alexander – he has no family name because he is afraid the police will come after him-, who runs the magazine “fire to the prisons”

http://firetotheprisons.com/

When I asked him what was, according to him, the definition of political prisoner, he said “every prisoner is a political prisoner. The concept “common criminal” does not exist”

Then, at three o’clock, Sensibili alle foglie took their place on the stage of the pavilion.

And we listened to them. More on that tomorrow.

Trieste, ex Ospedale psichiatrico di Trieste, Basagliana: conversation between Carmen Roll, Franco Rotelli, Peppe Dell’Acqua, Giovanna Gallio and Stefano Graziani.

14 June

Thirty years after the Basaglian revolution, which Basaglia started and the persons in this conversation, among others, accomplished, the issue is now if such a revolution can regress, in a time when personal freedom, right to work, emancipation and social compromise mean little.

Everything started, about this “L’Inadeguato” project, two years ago, with the first visit I did to the ex-mental hospital of Trieste, 2009. I wanted to re-enact one of the “assemblies” Basaglia used to do in Gorizia, giving the possibility to speak to people who had had no word for decades (the ricoverati or mental patients). As he said, what was important was not at all what they said, what was fundamental was giving the possibility of choice (to speak, to speak not) to people who never had any before.

This was not possible, because such an exercise in nostalgia couldn’t be tolerated by the people who worked there, who kept working after the death of Basaglia in 1979.

Since then I visited many mental houses, and day centers, in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Germany (Breitenau), Belgium, Spain. I can say, Trieste is unique. Nowhere in the world these two concepts make sense but in Trieste: “emancipation” and “NOT socially dangerous”.

So I can say that in Trieste I met people who changed completely the way I think. But, as Giovanna Gallio said today: “what is relevant now, even when we have conquered, even when no one would dare say we were wrong, is: never leave the margins, never fully integrate in the mainstream of psychiatry”

Many thanks to them for coming today to that pavilion – that ghost, the pavilion, I am still trying to get.

Pendant cette rencontre Dora García a interrogé Esther Ferrer sur sa trajectoire artistique et ses positions politiques et artistiques de l’époque du franquisme à aujourd’hui. Il a aussi été question de sa position d’artiste « en exil » ou plus précisément d’artiste “déplacée” de l’Espagne vers la France dans les années 60. Esther Ferrer a évoqué ses relations personnelles avec quelques figures des avant-gardes intellectuelles dans les années 70 tel que David Cooper et la pensée Française avec Michel Foucault et Jacques Lacan. Autre aspect de cette rencontre : en tant qu’artistes représentant l’Espagne à la Biennale de Venise (en 1999 pour Esther Ferrer, en 2011, cette année donc, pour Dora Garcia) comment gérer la relation à l’Etat et à ses modes de fonctionnement institutionnels et politiques ?

Plateforme d’édition et de création contemporaine
www.rosascape.com

Mad Marginal: antipsychiatry tradition and marginality as artistic position.A seminar by Dora Garcia with Claudia de Michelis, Cesare Pietroiusti and Nicola Valentino

22 June 2010

http://formcontent.org/other-projects/mad-marginal/

http://www.peep-hole.org/index.php?/events/mad-marginal/

a seminar by Dora García with Stefano Graziani, Cesare Pietroiusti, Nicola Valentino 
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March 1, 2010 from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm

Mad Marginal is a project undertaken by the artist last November, with the homonymous textpublished in Peep-Hole Sheet #03 (Mousse Publishing) dealing with the idea of marginality as a political position in art, its contradictions, and its beauty. Garcia recognized then the similarities between antipsychiatry, Antonin Artaud and Jack Smith (the underground film-maker that the artist reveres). Mad Marginal consists of a series of workshops, seminars and performances; of an archive research on historical documentation; of a curatorial exercise focusing on projects by contemporary artists; of the participation of the artist to the Faenza Contemporary Art Festival; of a publication and a short experimental film. The final presentation of the project will take place at the Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento, with the launch and preview of the publication and the experimental film within the Trentoship and Trento.link projects.

The project is prompted by Dora García’s readings of the writings of Franco Basaglia, psychiatrist and researcher, promoter on 1978 of Italian Law 180, allowing Italy to be one of the first countries in the world to abolish mental hospitals and becoming a laboratory of experimentation for the treatments of mental illness.Mad Marginal wants to research a form of artistic practice, using the tradition of antipsychiatry and very specially the named “Basaglian revolution” as a prism to look at certain cases of artists who have consciously chosen to remain outside the mainstream.

Dora García (Valladolid, Spain, 1965) lives and works in Brussels. Her work, conceptual in nature, consists of text, photographs, and installations restricted to a specific location. Often drawing on participation and performance, the artist presents reality as multiple and questionable and explores the relationship between the artist, the work, and the public. She participated to biennials in Athens, Lyon (2009), Sidney and Seville (2008) and to Münster Sculpture Projects (2007). Solo shows were held at CGAC in Santiago de Compostela (2009), at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2007) and at SMAK in Gent (2006).
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Participants to the seminar will be Stefano Graziani, artist and researcher, who will talk about the influence of the “Basaglian revolution” in the cultural climate in Italy, as he has researched previously for his project The Franco Basaglia Museum, in Manifesta 7; Cesare Pietroiusti, artist trained as psychiatrist, invited to present his research “Museum of Italian Art in Exile” (project in progress funded by Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento premiered here officially on this occasion); Nicola Valentino, co-founder of Sensibili alle foglie publisher, invited to talk about the on-going Archivio di scritture, scrizioni e arte ir-ritata.

The seminar is coordinated by Anna Daneri
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Peep-Hole would like to thank Andrea Viliani, Director of Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento, for the precious collaboration.
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Thanks to DOCVA, Milan

On the occasion of Peep-Hole Sheet #03, Dora García presents Mad Marginal. This is the first appearance of a larger project, titled in the same way, that the artist is developing for Fondazione Galleria Civica Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento. The whole project is prompted by Dora García’s readings of the writings of Franco Basaglia and is related to issues of censorship, audience-artist relationship, mainstream and marginality.

The text follows the structure of recent “guided tour texts” that García has written, such as Crowd: poetry and dream; Crowd: What a fucking wonderful audience; and Crowd: The artist without works.
These texts are intended as “deranged essays”, based on intense associations, a bit hallucinatory, like in a trance.