Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

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.)

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.

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #6. It features a conversation with Spanish artist Dora García.

For over 18 years García has worked with performance to deal critically with relationships between artworks, audiences, and places. Her projects are often developed in response to works by others and deploy performers as intermediaries in ambiguous roles as undercover agents, prophets, guides or spies.

In this conversation she traces the origins of her performance practice from a diverse creative community in Brussels in the early 2000s to the Happenings by Argentinian polymath Oscar Masotta happening again in her recent work Segunda Vez (2018). 

David Hoyle (b.1962, Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a performance and visual artist. His work over the last 30+ years has referenced gender, politics, identity, mental health issues and the ongoing fight for equality.

Hoyle came to prominence in the ‘90s as The Divine David, a kind of anti-drag queen whose lacerating social commentary – targeting both bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene, which he called, “the biggest suicide cult in history” – was offset by breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm. Following a couple of outré late-night Channel 4 TV shows and a part in the movie Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes, Hoyle killed off The Divine David, during a spectacular show at the Streatham International Ice Arena in 2000 and retreated to Manchester for “a period of reflection”.

He returned to television screens in 2005 in Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley, then began performing live again, under his own name. Hoyle’s biting satire, bravura costumes, wicked comic timing, and compelling charisma remained intact.

Hoyle is also a prolific painter often painting in his live shows. His paintings are deeply personal, and tackle the same themes as his performances, incorporating domestic waste, flyers, newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, and more, which reinforce his disdain for the ruling-class bourgeoisie.

This is the first book dedicated to Hoyle’s paintings, offering an edited selection of works made between 2010 and 2022. At Hoyle’s request, all of the works are published undated: thus, emphasising their timelessness, timeliness, relevance, and urgency to the desperate age in which we now find ourselves!

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Koreografi / Choreography is a magazine initiated and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Runa Borch Skolseg and Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness. The magazine consists of texts written by Nordic artists within the field of dance and choreography.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.