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.”