MURCIA.- DOMINÓ CANÍBAL is a project of the Dept of Culture & Tourism of the Region of Murcia within PAC (Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo de Murcia 2010) and curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, in which each artist starts off from the work of the previous artist. Following the successive interventions by Jimmie Durham, Cristina Lucas, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kendell Geers, Tania Bruguera and Rivane Neuenschwander, now it is Francis Alÿs turn.

Rayuela [Hopscotch]
“Jimmie eats Verónica, Cristina eats Jimmie, Bruce eats Cristina, Kendell eats Bruce, Tania eats Kendell, Rivane eats Tania...As the last course on the menu, does it mean I have to digest them all?

My participation is going to be a kind of feedback of the whole story of Dominó Caníbal and mainly consists in coordinating three critical analyses of the project coupled with the photographic archive of the previous interventions so far.

To foreclose any purely chronological reading and instead encourage a more open revision, I locked in on the coincidence between the number (155) of images officially chosen on the project’s website and the number of chapters in Julio Cortázar’s famous novel Rayuela, translated into English as Hopscotch. The reference to the children’s game struck me as quite appropriate for a scenario where the narrator throws the stone at each one of the participating artists.

As is well known, in the opening pages of the book, Cortázar suggests a "table of instructions" for reading—or hopscotching through—the novel. I applied the same guideline to a re-ordering of the sequence of images and invited three people related with the project in different ways to spontaneously narrate their experience and/or interpretation of the process.

•Cuauhtemoc Medina, the international agent, curator and instigator of the project.

•Carlos Jiménez, a Spanish-based critic who has followed the whole series.

•Sara Serrano, the local producer of all the fantasies and/or realities of the artists invited to Murcia .

Each image appears for around 12 seconds: enough time to register the scene yet not enough to work out any kind of storyline. The artist-coordinator does not interfere with the comments of the interviewees, instead limiting his role to registering the verbal ricochet between the narrator and the constant flow of registers. Sala Verónicas itself remains exactly as it was left by Rivane Neuenschwander, the Brazilian artist preceding me.

The interviews are presented in three corners of the space but will also be uploaded on the website in order to break with the imposition of Sala Verónicas as the exclusive physical framework for the interventions and thus help Dominó Caníbal make its way to the final phase of its anthropophagous passage: the memory.” Francis Alÿs, December 2010.

DOMINÓ CANÍBAL (PAC MURCIA 2010): FRANCIS ALŸS
DECEMBER 17TH – JANUARY 20TH. SALA VERÓNICAS , MURCIA ( SPAIN