The Breathing Lesson

Although Dora Garcia (°1965, Valladolid, Spain) produces work that is mostly performative and installation-based, video is used as a means to question the boundaries between representation and reality. The artist engages herself with the question of what is real and what is fiction, and thus visitors become protagonists in a fiction- sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. In “the Breathing lesson” the viewer observes a tour-de-force exercise, consisting of commanding a young girl’s breathing both in rhythm and manner. Obeying to the clapping-of-hands of a woman – the trainer – she is willingly guided to the very limits of physical capacity of the human body: there is even one type of clapping to which the girl reacts by not breathing at all.