The Sinthome Score

Dora Garcia
Born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1965.
She lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

Dora Garcia’s loosely scripted and open-ended stories, performances, and scenarios probe how language, literature, translation, and the unconscious impact the social formation of identity. Her works circle an ongoing negotiation between author and audience, actor and public. She defined the core of her work in an online interview in initiArt Magazine (2011) as “her research on the negotiation [...] between the one who speaks and the one who listens.” Her Beggar’s Opera (2007)—based on the character Filch in John Gay’s opera of the same name from 1728 and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928)—interfered with and contradicted the expectations of its (at times unwitting) participants in the unbounded city space of Munster, Germany. The Inadequate, the project she designed for the Spanish Pavilion at the 2011 edition of the Biennale di Venezia, initiated a six-month performance around the concept of inadequacy, maladjustment, and unsuitability.
Garcia’s latest iteration of her conceptual piece The Sinthome Score (2013–2014), first presented at KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2013, transforms the roles of speaker and listener into those of reader and dancer. Its score is based on an “unofficial” English translation of Jacques Lacan’s seminar 23, “Le Sinthome” (1975–1976), a series of ten lectures that drew from the writings of James Joyce to elaborate on language, the unconscious, and a reconsideration of the Borromean knot. Garcia’s work is accompanied by ten sets of movements, one drawn for each of the ten lectures. Two performers determine the rhythm, cadence, and speed of the performance, which runs continuously throughout the 2015 Biennale’s opening hours. Garcia’s score and choreographic notation welcome new participants, accidental stutters of the body, or slips of the tongue. It is left to the visitor to decide if, how, and when to enter the conversation.