Interval 16. Dora García
Second Time Around
Inside the Intervals series, which screens films without commercial distribution, and coinciding with the conclusion of the solo exhibition on Dora García (18 April – 3 September), the artist’s latest film Segunda Vez (Second Time Around) will be screened in the Sabatini Auditorium. The film explores the relationship between fiction and history and the ways of approaching reality through staging; that is to say, the mechanisms of representation.
Segunda Vez is a feature-length film assembled through four medium-length pieces — shown as separate episodes or as a whole — and takes the thinking of Argentinian intellectual Oscar Masotta (1930–1979), multi-faceted and pivotal on numerous fronts, as its guiding principle. Masotta introduced Lacanian psychoanalysis to Argentina, Mexico and Spain, theorised on the mass media through semiotics and structuralism, and was a literary critic and exponent of the Argentinian avant-garde as well as a heterodox Marxist. His early disappearance and constant marginalisation, caused by the heterodox nature of his theories and his distance from the dominant figure of the organic intellectual, pushed him into obscurity and cemented his mythological status among artists and specialists.
Across the four episodes, Second Time Around explores who Oscar Masotta was and what he represented, punctuating strategies of metafiction and reiteration. The first, To Induce the Spirit of the Image, involves a restaging of one of the most controversial happenings, not only in Masotta’s work but also in 1960s Argentina: twenty actors dressed as lumpenproletariat — the majority bourgeois and from the Di Tella art centre in Buenos Aires — are paid for letting themselves be watched by visitors for an hour. The Everlasting brings together a series of people linked to performance, psychoanalysis, politics and Masotta inside a library, while The Helicopter sees Dora García repeat the homonymous happening that Masotta created in 1967 in Buenos Aires. Finally, Second Time Around is an acted-out improvisation about Julio Cortázar’s story under the same name, which narrates, through a conversation repeated in two situations, how the State’s machine of terror operated during the dictatorship in Argentina.
The film has been awarded the Grand Prix of the International Competition at FidMarseille 2018 (Marseille International Film Festival), ex aequo with Albert Serra.
Programme
Dora García
Segunda Vez, 2018
Belgium and Norway, HD colour, original version with English subtitles, 94’
Session 1. Saturday, 1 September – 7pm
Presented by Dora García and Ana Longoni, the curator of the exhibition Oscar Masotta. The Theory of Action (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, 2017, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, MACBA, 2018), an art historian specialised in the Argentinian avant-garde and director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Session 2. Monday, 3 September – 7pm
Presented by Dora García and Chema González, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural and Audiovisual Activities.