Annotated Finnegans Wake (part of Dora García’s Exhausted Books, 2013)
Dora García reproduces the meeting space of a reading club in Zurich, organised by the Zürich James Joyce Foundation, which gathers weekly to comment on James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The artist includes replicas of ten session books, brimming with notes and detailed annotations. They are all open to page 196, which corresponds to the most cited and commented chapter of Finnegans Wake, and are surrounded by other annotations, papers and cuttings from other books, which in the joint reading sessions Dora García attended would end up being tied in to the text.
From another exhibition:
The Joycean Society (2013), filmed in colour this time, evokes a group reading of Finnegans Wake, typical of those carried out in Zurich society over the past thirty years. One word is deciphered at a time, and often group readings stop for the evening after only having read one or two pages.
Shortly after filming the passionate Joyce-ingrained group, Dora Garía was invited to complete a residency in Aix-en-Provence, and chose to work with the Montperrin psychiatric hospital. She asked the group in attendance at a workshop to read Finnegans Wake and 65 Rêves de Franz Kafka, by Félix Guattari, and filmed the ensuing discussions. The atmosphere is just as joyous, as regulars open up about the unusal minglings between their readings and their dreams, between the events of their days and nights, simple pleasures and fears all mixed together. Here we see García’s interest in the world of emotions and marginality, and in the constant tracking of the realities of the “other,” which are sometimes ignored, hidden or repressed. (X)
