Dolor exquisito

Radiant, visual and heart-rending

- Federico Irazábal, La Nación

One can't explain pain, so you have to tell a story. Trivial. Of a heart, broken by distance, by a journey. Another. When you tell a story of love, sooner or later you tell a painful story, or one about pain. What does Sophie Calle tell us about in her work, Dolor Exquisito (Exquisite Pain)? About a way to cure the pain? About a pre-pyschoanalytical exorcism? That exposing our painful soul is the start of the cure? Who takes on the most painful pain? Where does the loss hurt? What happens with pain and what produces the pain?

- Emilio García Wehbi

"In 1984, I got a grant to go to Japan for three months. I left Paris on October 25 without knowing that that date marked the beginning of 92 days counting down to the end of a love story. Nothing out of the ordinary but at that moment I experienced the unhappiest day of my life," says French artist Sophie Calle, recalling the true event which 20 years later led to the creation of a work which is as full of life as it is moving. On her return to France, when people asked her how her trip had gone, all she could remember was the sadness of being abandoned. That was when she decided to begin a kind of study amongst her friends, asking them what event had caused them the most suffering. Her very detailed investigation allowed her to play down her own pain by comparing it to that of other people. This process proved to be extraordinarily effective. The exorcism had worked.

Following the path of Sophie Calle, the Argentinians Emilio García Wehbi (writer, director and co-founder of the Periférico de Objetos company) and Maricel Álvarez (an actress and choreographer with extensive onstage experience who can also be seen shortly in Biutiful, the latest film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Amores Perros and 21 Grams) bring to the stage a work combining theatre, photographs and film which portrays - between the fictitious and the truthful, the painful and the pleasurable - the frantic attempts of a woman to relieve the pain of a broken heart, to convert all her anguish into a dolor exquisito (exquisite pain).