Dora García (1965, Valladolid) is an artist, teacher, and researcher who lives and works in Oslo. As an artist, she has participated in numerous international art exhibitions, including the Münster Sculpture Projects (2007), the Venice Biennial (2011, 2013, 2015), the Sydney Biennial (2008), the São Paulo Biennial (2010), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), the Gwangju Biennial (2016) and the Aichi Triennale (2019). Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society. It explores the political potential of marginal positions and pays homage to eccentric characters and antiheroes.
The Hearing Voices Café
Activities, 2014
The Hearing Voices Café is a collective project, initiated by artist Dora García but of collective authorship. It is a community attending a program of talks, literary events, concerts and audiovisual and performance presentations, or very informal chats they themselves have designed. This Hearing Voices community follows in the footsteps of antipsychiatry, hearing voices networks (Intervoice), Mad Pride, and mutual support groups. Through the years, it has evolved to include intersectionality and situated knowledge, learning from the different territories where it has taken place. For this iteration, the project will be looking into Riga-based support groups for Ukrainian war refugees currently living in Latvia, focusing on building mutual understanding between the Ukrainian community and the general public. Although the community is usually hosted by an existing and fully functioning café, in Survival Kit 13, it will have its own space at the festival venue, where a pop-up cafeteria bearing the name of the project will be opened in collaboration with Ukrainian amateur cooks living in Latvia.
Hear the stories of Ukrainians, and find out more about the other editions of the project, on the blog: http://thehearingvoicescafe.doragarcia.org/