Enrique Vila-Matas, renowned Spanish writer – who claims to have gotten to literature by “mistake”, since what he really wanted was to be in filmmaking, but being assigned a millitary post in the North of Africa for a year led him to write a novel (Mujer en el Espejo Contemplando el Paisaje, 1973), “so as to not have the feeling of wasted time” – is the author of a wide and singular body of work, divided between novels, short stories and essays. Vila-Matas has received several awards, including those for Bartleby and Company (2000), Montano’s Malady (2002), Doctor Pasavento (2006) and Dublinesque (2010).
A guest of the Festival in 2012, Vila-Matas returns to Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival for the launch of the portuguese edition of Marienbad électrique (2015). The book evolved from the conversations and collaborations the Spanish writer maintained throughout the last 8 years with French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. This is “an unusual novel”, in Vila-Matas’ words, in the border between contemporary art and literature, and it “is also an installation, a text from a catalogue (for an exhibit by Gonzalez-Foerster), an essay and it can even be read as a poem”.
Electric Marienbad is also a chronicle of the friendship between the two artists, of their exchange of ideas and mutual aesthetic stimulation, from their very first meetings at the Bonaparte Café, in Paris, to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibitions at the Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid (Splendide Hotel), at the Tate, in London (TH.2058), and her major retrospective, at the Centre Pompidou, 1887-2058.
With constant references to Rimbaud, Sebald, Bolaño or Beckett, and in Duchamp’s shadow, an artist they both admire, Electric Marienbad gets its title from Alain Resnais’ film, Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, adapted from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel. Vila-Matas summarises Electric Marienbad saying that “the central thesis of the book is that art is a faith. I believe in the passion for art as the centre of existence.”