La muerte de la lectora
Image: Alicia Valdés
La muerte de la lectora (The death of the reader) is a multidisciplinary performance created and developed by Luna Miguel (Director and body), Paola de Diego (stage plastic) and Alicia Valdés (curatorship and text). The performance explores the relationship between the body and the act of reading through the concept of somatic reading. The performance took place at Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid) from the 25th to the 27th of April of 2023.
“What is somatic reading? How does a book change the body of its reader? Luna Miguel has been asking herself these questions for years, as well as drawing and theorizing around the corporealization of the literary gesture. As she explains in her essay Leer mata, "the body tells stories", "the body stores stories", "the body is the beginning of all stories. Also of those that echo the chronologies of reading". Perhaps it was these thoughts that made her sick after reading James Joyce's Ulysses in just three days. An unhealthy, voracious reading, for as the philosopher Alicia Valdés writes: "an unconscious reading is always an embodied reading". More questions: What can a body do, and what can a book generate against a body? To find out, and after having put herself to the test in the self-harming play Ternura y derrota, Luna Miguel, or in this case, la Lectora, will once again take the stage in April 2023 on a stage designed by the plastic artist Paola de Diego, where she will try to beat her own reading record, letting herself be watched by the spectators for more than forty-eight hours, in a session of reading and reading with hardly any pause to eat or rest, without the possibility of interacting with another being that is not made of pages. Sitting at a desk, she must devour everything her eyes can feed on. It is not a matter of witnessing how fast this child reads, nor how much it takes her to get past the halfway point of Anna Karenina, or The Book of Genji, or Memories of the Future. Again in the words of Valdés, it is more a matter of contemplating how "literature becomes literal when it crosses our bodies". Will Lectora die? Will she endure the pain of the self-imposed challenge? Will the feat be more bearable if everyone around her is reading? If from the armchairs other bodies undertake the same journey? If those who normally read Lectora are now the ones who give her other texts to distract her or clear her mind during the tedious remaining hours?”
Review of the piece
Pictures by Isabel Sangro
