A thematic project by The Uqbar Foundation (Irene Kopelman and Mariana Castillo Deball) (November 2007-February 2008)

“Someone might object that the more the work tends towards the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from the “author”. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatorial of experiences, information, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles.” Italo Calvino, Six Proposals for the Next Millennium

This seminar will elaborate on the figure of the storyteller, exploring the territories where this figure seems to defoliate, mutate, mirror, multiply and disappear. Even when the figure of the author evaporates, we still have a story, an anecdote with an independent existence. Can we have narrative without a primary source? Or is this the very nature of storytelling, a bodiless narrative that can continue traveling throughout objects, readers and texts, regardless of its author? In this project, we want to explore this dynamic, from one hand talking about the transformation of the author and from the other about the sovereignty of storytelling as an independent stream traveling through time.

The project will consist of seminars by Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman from The Uqbar Foundation, as well as public lectures by guest tutors from the fields of art, history and literature. Among them are Dora Garcia, Mika Hannula, Raimundas Malasauskas, Daniel Stolzenberg, and Jalal Toufic.