Dora Garcia: An ESP Evening
On the occasion of her residency at The Lab for the project “The Hearing Voices Lab” , Dora Garcia speaks about her research into ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception). To the reproach that he would never know what people really dreamt, but only how they narrated their dreams, Freud answered: “But I am not interested in their dreams, only in the narration of their dreams.” Similarly, what interests Dora Garcia in ESP (voice hearing among other perceptions) is not their origin, and even less whether they are “real” or “imagined”; what interests her is how they are narrated by the people who experience them, and how ESP affects them. The artist has collected a number of these narrations, and enjoys comparing them to such iconic moments as the confession of Philip K Dick at the 1977 Metz Science Fiction Conference: “At that time I had no idea of what I was seeing, it resembled nothing that I had heard described, it resembled plasmic energy, it had colours, it moved fast, it collected, and then dispersed, but what it was, what He was, I am not sure even now.”