Following her interest in James Joyce as a social and literary phenomenon and her film The Joycean Society (2013), Dora García embarked on a research on the Irish author and his ties to Norway and in particular the writer Henrik Ibsen. During his youth, Joyce studied Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen in its original language, and in 1901, on Ibsen’s seventy-first birthday, he wrote a letter of admiration to him. The original letter, however, is lost, and only the draft remains. In 12 Attempts to Forge a Letter from Joyce to Ibsen in 1901 (2014), García handwrites the lost communication between the two authors; a speculative exercise that explores the blurred boundaries between the real and its linguistic representation whilst conceiving the acts of writing and reading as an unending interchange between reader and text, both affecting and depending on one another.
(Sergi Rusca)