Révolution (2022)
In the space there is a chair with a large piece of folded paper. A performer arrives, takes the folded paper, and proceeds to unfold it, carefully, as it is fragile.
The folded paper is divided into three parts and the performer must make them match carefully, finally displaying a very big sign extended on the floor where one can read: ‘Révolution, tiens ta promesse!’ (Revolution, fulfill your promise!). Once the poster is perfectly unfolded and readable on the floor, the performer sits on the chair or walks around the poster, ‘guarding’ it, keeping it safe, like a sentinel.
The sentence ‘Revolution, fulfill, your promise!’ is completed with the sentence “Emancipate women” and it was shown by feminist activist Margarita Robles de Mendoza in 1936 at the Plaza del Zócalo, Mexico City.
Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years (2017)
In Dora García’s Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years, two performers face each other, their gazes interlocked. Each is positioned inside one of two non-concentric circles.
As one performer moves, the other must alter their position to maintain a constant distance, which they agreed to keep between them at the beginning of the performance. All of this happens while the performers maintain eye contact.
At some point, however, this becomes impossible as the circles are not concentric. When this happens, the performers must start over in an endless game of continual negotiation.
Behind: The Bug (the future is behind us)
Performance Score, activated 07.06.2024, 17:30-17:50h
The Bug (The Future is Behind Us), 2024, is a timeline of historical events, a performance score which serves as an appendix to the larger project The Bug (After Mayakovsky), 2022, by Dora García and Others. It is to be read out loud, alone or in a group, while walking backwards. The timeline has been developed collectively following a series of live gatherings together with collaborators, students and audience members and subsequently edited by Dora García.
The Bug (After Mayakovsky) is a performance adaptation of one of the last plays by Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky. The play, written in 1929, introduces a science fiction plot popular already then and used many times since: a visitor to the future coming from a past that is our present. In Mayakovsky’s bitter and comic play, a soviet revolutionary is frozen in 1929 and reawakens in 1979 – by accident, a parasite accompanies him in this time travel.
Using Mayakovsky’s play as a guide, a collective author wants to analyze questions such as: What happens in a time lapse of 50 years? How to explain 50 years to someone who spent them in a coma? Is it true that history moves in cycles and there is an eternal return? Could we speak of glitches in this infinite repetition, and could we liken the glitch* to The Bug? The shared disappointment of the man projected into the future and the inhabitants of that future forced to confront their original past is what helps us analyze our present moment in terms of repetition, melancholy, and action.
The development of the project aimed at studying and understanding collectively created and performed theater / performance, forming a collective made of different ages, experiences, and disciplines; the idea of collective going even beyond the artists’ group. The Bug (After Mayakovsky) adopted a format, the public rehearsal, that allowed for instant feedback from the audience, and no one present was out of it, approaching even the assembly format.
*A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. A glitch, which is slight and often temporary, differs from a more serious bug which is a genuine functionality-breaking problem.
Dora García lives and works in Oslo. She often works with film, performance, and theater. Her research focuses on contemporary history, ethics, and politics. Dora García represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011. Her works have been exhibited internationally in museums and biennials, such as MuHKA, Antwerp; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, Brussels; Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; Fonderie Darling – Centre d’Arts Visuels, Montréal; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris; as well as (d)OCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, 2nd Athens Biennial, Lyon Biennial, 29th São Paulo Biennial, and the Gwangju Biennial.
