All the Stories

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec exile from Mexico named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.

With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

An encounter between dance and visual arts.

Dance First Think Later - The Thinking Body between Dance and Visual Arts follows on from the exhibition-festival Dance First Think Later - An Encounter between Dance and Visual Arts, presented in Geneva in summer 2020, documenting it with a wealth of iconography and enriching it with a critical, theoretical and historical perspective on the works and the project. Commissioned texts are devoted to the 22 artists, written by authors active in museums, festivals, art schools, independent critics and artists.

The biennial event Dance First Think Later explores the converging fields between dance, performance, visual arts and moving images. Arta Sperto, which is organising and producing the exhibition-festival and publishing the book, is developing a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the operating mechanisms of the visual and performing arts, and the respective characteristics of museums/art centres and theatres/festivals. This approach is motivated by the need to support artists whose cross-disciplinary practices come up against the way in which culture is still largely organised by field, whether in terms of cultural policies, institutions, funding or the media. Starting with the works themselves, the book offers food for thought on cross-disciplinary approaches to the contemporary arts.

With / around Halil Altindere, Alexandra Bachzetsis & Julia Born, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Alex Cecchetti, Clément Cogitore, Dara Friedman, Gerard & Kelly, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Lenio Kaklea, La Ribot, Pierre Leguillon, Xavier Le Roy, Klara Lidén, Melanie Manchot, Olivier Mosset & Jacob Kassay, Samuel Pajand, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Alexandra Pirici, Julien Prévieux, Marinella Senatore, Gregory Stauffer, Barbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca.

Visit [country] is an artist’s book that brings together texts taken word for word from official government tourism websites and state-produced promotional videos from every UN-recognized country in the world. Stripped of the usual accompanying imagery and inspirational music, what becomes clear is how tourism feeds on — and is fuelled by — nationalism, chauvinism, and the invention of identity.

Much like a “choose your own adventure” book, the reader is guided by a series of questions that connect one country to another through recurring ideas and clichés, and must decide whether to visit the destination with “the best food”, “the most beautiful women”, “the friendliest people”, or “the most authentic history”. The book also includes an extensive concept index that maps the thematic and linguistic patterns linking the nations’ self-descriptions. It is a journey where every country is the best.

The project grows out of The Complete National Anthems of the World, a durational performance first presented in 2023, and stands as a parallel, autonomous, yet complementary work.

4SPIKE & howawfulallanis, Alex Less, Alice Royer, Alligataure, Amelie Clicquot, Anjol, Arañada, Axel Fievet , Axelle Bourguignon, Baron & Tosma, Charlie Cooper, Charlotte Sallan Gémard, Délora Abbal, Elliott Sanchez, Erimoczi, femo, Fleur Douglas, Gaia Bergelin & Inès Camrla, Justine Bouvet, Kara, Kiara Patry, Lilian Magardeau & Elisa Grondin, Loreleï, Lucile Moreau, Manon Souza, Marie Martin Design, Mira, Migraine, Nathan Peron, Nathanael Brelin, Nomaison, Ema Tomas, Othilie Jourde Ledoux, Piquico , Rémy Bellariva, Séraphin Degroote Ferrera et Arthur Diguet, Syan Fischer, Tanikawa Sari, Vanessa Kintzel, Virginie Contier, Viviane Le Borgne, Zoé Vincent. 

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.