RH / WORKS / SCORES / EDITIONS

JAMES JOYCE, AUTOR DE UNA TEMPORADA EN EL INFIERNO
2012/24. Publication, archive and installation

The project consists of the publication of the book "Una temporada en el infierno por James Joyce", the creation of a bookshelf-archive, and the production of an art installation (reading room), which will allow us to explore the relationships between the action of reading, perception, the materiality of words, and the fiction it presents. The project begins with the translation and rewriting into Spanish of the poem "A Season in Hell," written in French by Arthur Rimbaud, using the words contained in the novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," written in English by James Joyce. Here, Spanish is used as a conceptual hinge to articulate the lexical, thematic, and stylistic coincidences, as well as a whole series of events and fictions that surround the works and their authors through their epiphanies and visions. A kind of quixotic endeavor in the spirit of Pierre Menard.
This interweaving also operates in the relational device (the installation)—facilitating the exchange between the reality of experience, the construction of relationships, marginal notes, and imaginative production—to introduce the viewer-reader into a play of possible interpretations. At this point, reading gives rise to a new form of literature no longer limited to words, but multidimensional. Books associated with Rimbaud and Joyce are interspersed with all sorts of discoveries in the form of objects, records, and images that allow us to trace a common path that transits between one's own experience and places of special relevance in their literary creations. The act of reading is manifestly embodied; the text must be revealed in the exhibition hall, and all the accompanying elements serve only to contextualize and challenge us as actors, opening up a new perspective in what we might consider the reversibility of the intertextual and hypertextual phenomenon. The possibility of reading previous works from new points of view ultimately modifies the original work, infinitely multiplying its significant potential.

2025 / info@raulhidalgo.net / IG