PROLOGUE
Ficções [Fictions] is the name of a book by Jorge Luis Borges. I thought that it would also make a good title for my exhibition. After all, Borges has been with me ever since the beginning of all this. And all of this has always had to do with fiction. Make-believe. Whimsy. Delirium. Utopia. Art. In short, lying.
Nothing of what I relate below came in the order listed or in the state described. In fact, none of this came in any order. Every process is a current; we never really know where it’s going to take us. In the beginning it is intuition. And at the end it is pure fiction.
Let’s begin, then, with the cover. Or better, let’s start at the front: the façade of the gallery, which has already been so many things. And if the façade were to be transformed into a giant book, Um grande livro, Vermelho [A big book, Vermelho]? We would all feel tiny, but we would see that there is a door, that we could go inside. And, like Alice, we would enter.
There inside, we would find images of an open book. It would consist of two identical and different books. A rather large book, but actually it is we who would be small. It would blend two languages: Ulyisses. This is the book I would invent.
In the back we would be able to see some huge letters. They would seem to emerge from the floor. We would be able to walk among them. It would be as though the things and the landscapes could speak: the floor, the sky, the wind, the cities, the houses, the walls. Because the words are everywhere: between us and the other, and the outside, between us and the world.
We would return to our normal size upon seeing two people playing crosswords. But they would be invisible, we would see only their hands. As though they were our hands. The strange thing is that the words would also be invisible, but the hands would play as though it were an ordinary game. Would this be a senseless game? One never knows for sure what is guiding O movimento das Ilhas [The movement of the Islands].
We would then hear a strange sound. The same hands (yes, they look like the same ones) would be using machines to write a long piece of Correspondência [Mail]. As though there were no email! Or as though what they were writing were actually an email. Or as though we were in another time. As though we were someone else.
Once I was in Mexico. I had just seen giant letters being born from concrete. I noticed a used bookstore that was called El Laberinto – Librería de las Utopías Posibles [The Maze – Possible Utopias Bookstore]. I thought to myself: and what if it were possible to find them, these possible utopias? And what if they all together formed a new labyrinth, wherein we would become lost, miniscule, among all of those attempts to get to know the world, to draw its maps, topographies and histories, to understand them and change them?
And what if in that same room, the scrivener began a huge file of phrases Com palavras de palavras por palavras, palabras [In words of words for words, palabras]?*
And what if all of this were an exhibition, and it were called Ficções, like the book by Borges?
Marilá Dardot
São Paulo, winter 2008
PROLOGUE
Ficções [Fictions] is the name of a book by Jorge Luis Borges. I thought that it would also make a good title for my exhibition. After all, Borges has been with me ever since the beginning of all this. And all of this has always had to do with fiction. Make-believe. Whimsy. Delirium. Utopia. Art. In short, lying.
Nothing of what I relate below came in the order listed or in the state described. In fact, none of this came in any order. Every process is a current; we never really know where it’s going to take us. In the beginning it is intuition. And at the end it is pure fiction.
Let’s begin, then, with the cover. Or better, let’s start at the front: the façade of the gallery, which has already been so many things. And if the façade were to be transformed into a giant book, Um grande livro, Vermelho [A big book, Vermelho]? We would all feel tiny, but we would see that there is a door, that we could go inside. And, like Alice, we would enter.
There inside, we would find images of an open book. It would consist of two identical and different books. A rather large book, but actually it is we who would be small. It would blend two languages: Ulyisses. This is the book I would invent.
In the back we would be able to see some huge letters. They would seem to emerge from the floor. We would be able to walk among them. It would be as though the things and the landscapes could speak: the floor, the sky, the wind, the cities, the houses, the walls. Because the words are everywhere: between us and the other, and the outside, between us and the world.
We would return to our normal size upon seeing two people playing crosswords. But they would be invisible, we would see only their hands. As though they were our hands. The strange thing is that the words would also be invisible, but the hands would play as though it were an ordinary game. Would this be a senseless game? One never knows for sure what is guiding O movimento das Ilhas [The movement of the Islands].
We would then hear a strange sound. The same hands (yes, they look like the same ones) would be using machines to write a long piece of Correspondência [Mail]. As though there were no email! Or as though what they were writing were actually an email. Or as though we were in another time. As though we were someone else.
Once I was in Mexico. I had just seen giant letters being born from concrete. I noticed a used bookstore that was called El Laberinto – Librería de las Utopías Posibles [The Maze – Possible Utopias Bookstore]. I thought to myself: and what if it were possible to find them, these possible utopias? And what if they all together formed a new labyrinth, wherein we would become lost, miniscule, among all of those attempts to get to know the world, to draw its maps, topographies and histories, to understand them and change them?
And what if in that same room, the scrivener began a huge file of phrases Com palavras de palavras por palavras, palabras [In words of words for words, palabras]?*
And what if all of this were an exhibition, and it were called Ficções, like the book by Borges?
Marilá Dardot
São Paulo, winter 2008