DORA GARCÍA: THE HEARING VOICES LAB
The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco
November 22 – December 4, 2016
The designation “hearing voices” describes an aspect of being in public – we hear voices while sitting at a coffee shop, attending events, or when waiting on the train. At the same time, the phrase “hearing voices” also describes the phenomenon of hearing inner voices. Drawing on the ambiguity of the term, the Spanish artist Dora García is installing a gathering place for people who hear voices, hosted by The Lab.
The point of departure for this work is the artist’s interest in the voice-hearers’ movement, which has its roots in the anti-psychiatry groups of the 1970s and conceives of itself more as a civil rights movement than as a form of therapeutic self-help. The first joint activities came about in Holland in 1987 with the mission of challenging the medical model of mental illness, and from there spread rapidly to other countries. In the Bay Area, next to very active networks such as the Bay Area Hearing Voices Network, we find other very powerful support networks such as The Icarus Project.
Voice-hearing is not only a widespread phenomenon, but also a cultural-historically significant one. From Socrates to Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross to the American avant-garde writer Hannah Weiner, famous philosophers, believers and poets have regarded voice hearing as a rare talent and a special gift. Other artists have had less positive experiences with this phenomenon, but it nevertheless strongly influenced their work: Sarah Kane, Robert Walser, Virginia Woolf or Philip K. Dick, to name just a few examples.
García’s project revolves primarily around exchange, research and destigmatization, in former iterations as the Hearing Voices Café and here as the Hearing Voices Lab. Structurally it is composed of various elements including a neon sign, a small library made of casual donations and suggestions on the subject, and a newspaper. We are aiming at using the structure of Hearing Voices Lab to create a situation where such various activities as a Finnegans Wake reading group, a debate on book activism, and talks on archiving, representing, science fiction and revelation can take place. There will also be a number of events on the history and current activities of psychiatry-related resistance and civil rights movements as well as on the relationships between language, mental idiosyncrasies, capitalism and art. Within the regular and bustling operation of the host establishment The Lab, The Hearing Voices Lab will function as a public meeting place for voice-hearers and their friends, people interested in the phenomenon, and coincidental guests. To point out which guests hear voices and which ones don’t is irrelevant for the community gathering there.
http://www.thelab.org/projects/2016/8/13/dora-garcia-the-hearing-voices-cafe
