A propos
Programme
10:00-15:00
Masterclass Dora Garcia: Achronies, Uchronies and Fractal Narratives
15:00-17:00
Film Screening + Q&A with Dora Garcia: (Revolución, fulfil your promise) Amor Rojo
PART ONE 10:00-15:00
Masterclass: ACHRONIES, UCHRONIES AND FRACTAL NARRATIVES
Dora García will present a masterclass based on her film production over the past ten years: The Joycean Society (2013), Segunda Vez (2018), and Amor Rojo (2024), using them as case studies to explore three key concepts central to these projects: Uchronie, Achronie, and Fractal Narrative.
Dora will introduce Uchronie as a common speculative fiction strategy, an exercise in political imagination envisioning alternate timelines or “what if” scenarios (e.g. What if Germany had won WWII?). She will discuss how Uchronie offers a framework for rethinking social, historical, and political narratives.
She will then explore Achronie, a term coined by German sociologist Elisabeth Lenk as a counterpart to utopia. Achronie represents not an absence of time but its excess, epochs collapsing into one another like the folding legs of a tripod or nested Russian dolls. Dora will reflect on how this idea suggests a different model for the future: not an ideal place elsewhere, but a simultaneity of pasts and futures converging in the present.
The third concept, Fractal Narrative, will be addressed as a form of storytelling inspired by fractal geometry, endlessly iterative, paradoxically finite and infinite. Dora will explain how this structure can be applied to language, history (such as the recurring resurgence of fascism), and literature, with Finnegans Wake by James Joyce as a prime example.
To ground these concepts in practice, Dora will guide participants through a series of exercises for the SIC participants. First, recreating the scenario of The Joycean Society, participants will read and attempt to decipher a few paragraphs of Finnegans Wake.
As a second exercise, using the novel as a warm-up, Dora will invite participants to imagine specific historical moments where intervention might have altered the course of history. Together, they will build a collective timeline of these crucial times and places, associating images with each, in a speculative exercise of political and historical imagination.
PART TWO 15:00-17:00
Film Screening + Q&A: (Revolución, fulfil your promise) Amor Rojo
Belgian Premiere Screening
Info
Mexico, Spain, Norway, Belgium | 2024 | 95 min
Languages : Spanish, German, Russian
Subtitles : English, French
Synopsis
In order for the revolution to live up to its promise, might love be the missing ingredient? Artist Dora García delves into the archives and finds in the searing writings of Alexandra Kollontaï, an early-20th-century revolutionary, a precious ally of queer and feminist movements in Latin America and elsewhere. A joyfully militant political film.
Could it be that love is the missing ingredient for the revolution to finally live up to its
promise? The early-20th-century revolutionary, Marxist feminist and diplomat Alexandra Kollontaï believed this was true, as evidenced by her searing words: ''Solidarity should not be understood as the mere awareness of a community of interests. Solidarity is also the sentimental and spiritual bonds established between the members of the same collectivity. These feelings of sympathy, gentleness and sensitivity derive from a common source: the capacity to love.'' In a montage which combines archival footage in which her memory is preserved, a portrait of the words and actions of a militant group, and feminist demonstrations in Mexico City, artist Dora Garcia weaves together the threads connecting literature and the streets, and finds in Kollontaï a precious ally of queer and feminist movements in Latin America and elsewhere. A political and joyfully militant film.
About Dora Garcia
Working from text, archives, and audio files, Dora Garcia narrates both real and fictional stories to question and shake up society. Across a multifaceted body of work (video, writing, performance and installation), she challenges the traditional relationships between artworks and spectators. Her scenarios combine fiction and reality to the point of confusion, thus creating unique situations that are both intellectual and playful, which rely on an active, and sometimes obligatory, participation of the public in the creation, activation or destruction of the work.
Born in 1965 in Valladolid (Spain), Dora Garcia now lives and works in Oslo. She represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.
Filmography
(Revolution, Fulfil Your Promise) Red Love, 2024
If I Could Wish for Something, 2021
Love with Obstacles, 2020
Segunda Vez, 2018
Désordre, autour des crimes et des rêves, 2013
The Joycean Society, 2013
The Deviant Majority, 2010
Rooms, Conversations, 2006
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Ticket holders are welcome to attend this masterclass as observers.
