Dora García: Dialogue of Dogs

Dora García. Dialogue of Dogs: Cipión, Berganza, Freud, Joyce, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Gal Costa, Piglia, Lacan, Mallarmé, Bowie… resurrection is the second exhibition within the framework of the “House taken over” project, which is named after the story by the author Julio Cortázar. It is set up as an exhibition laboratory in which contemporary artists are invited to “take over” what was author Miguel de Cervantes’ house in Valladolid.

The exhibition conceived by the artist Dora García, under the curatorship of Agustín Pérez Rubio, weaves a web of references that connect literature, psychoanalysis and popular culture through different times and spaces with a double guiding thread: metamorphosis and resurrection.

The project’s starting point is The Dialogue of the Dogs (1613), a short story by Miguel de Cervantes set in front of the façade of the Hospital de la Resurrección, on which is an image of Christ Triumphant, today presiding over the garden of the Cervantes House Museum. Starting with these architectural remains, the artist connects the dogs Cipión and Berganza, the main characters in Cervantes’ story, to another nine characters whose names are in the title of the exhibition—the authors Joyce, Kafka, Mayakovski, Piglia and Mallarmé, the psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan, and the musicians Gal Costa and David Bowie.

The exhibition explores the idea of resurrection in a narrative that brings together figures of contemporary popular culture such as Gal Costa and David Bowie, the poems “That’s what” and “The Bedbug” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Finnegans Wake, a novel by James Joyce characterised by an explosion of language and the eternal return. It is in texts like Finnegans Wake—made up of polysemes, slips of the tongue and misunderstandings—that we encounter Lacan and Freud, and where the doors open up on wonders such as talking dogs, a literary tradition present in The Dialogue of the Dogs and in Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog. These are works of fiction in which the barrier between human and beast dissolves, and in which a process of metamorphosis takes place.

Dora García brings this extensive network of references and concepts to life in an exhibition marked by heterogenous formats. There are around thirty pieces, including sounds, tactile actions, drawings on the walls or floors and texts sculpted in gold or performed, all in dialogue with the different rooms the house is divided up into. The composer Jan Mech collaborated in the project by producing a sound adaptation of Kafka’s character “Odradek”, while eleven students from the Castilla and León Higher School of Dramatic Arts activate a performance in which the eleven protagonists from the exhibition title enter into dialogue—they are “brought back to life” to become our peers.

At the same time as the exhibition Dialogue of Dogs, the Cervantes House Museum is organising two talks on Kafka—one by the philosopher and author Aaron Schuster, the other by the psychiatrist and essayist Fernando Colina—a cycle of short films curated and presented by Manuel Asín, the coordinator of Fine Arts Centre of Madrid Film Section, guided visits and workshops for people of all ages.