PART OF THE TEXT " ALICE - VILLE " by BELEN GACHE
catalogue MACRO - MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO ROSARIO - 2005
Alicia Herrero

SOWING SEEDS OF TIME
The Administration area of the Museum is intervened with a series of plant nursery boxes, a kind of mini-garden that will be installed on the day of Alice-ville’s opening and that will remain there until the end of the show, monitored and watered with technical assistance.
To continue with fairy literature, we have, once again, a frequent theme, that of the castle that disappears engulfed by the disproportionate growth of the surrounding forest’s vegetation. Here also, it will be growth, the logic of the process, that will predominate, but in this case the museum castle city will be invaded from inside, at the very heart of its administration. Process, growth and movement imply becoming, and time. It is time that will go on occupying, gnawing away at and asphyxiating the museum castle’s will to eternity. Chronos and Aeon: everyday time (bodily time) and the disembodied time of Eternity enter into conflict here.
WHICH WAY?
In Alice-Ville, real space and real time are fictionalized.
Real time, that of accumulating utensils, of work, of organic plant growth, or of the body is converted into the works’ motive and materials. On the other hand, as happens with the White Rabbit’s watch in Wonderland, time’s very logic is subverted: the work Conversaciones, being conceived of as a process, will wind up concluding on the last day of the show and not on the day of the opening, as traditionally happens. In addition, the exhibition involves a series of changes in the institution’s cyclic routine, among them, a change in the hours during which it is open to the public.
As regards real space, like on other occasions when Alicia Herrero worked with paper museums (constructed out of images of works taken from art books and catalogs), here space becomes a spatialized book, just as the Magazine in situ (2004-2005) project also becomes a spatialized magazine, in real time and space.
Questioning the limits between reality and fiction brings us to question the space-time effectuation of events. Following Deleuze’s logic, it is not the space-time occurrence itself that constitutes it as such, but rather the added plus of signification that the viewer provides. The event is constructed like an ensemble of singular, sensitive and critical points.
Disembodied and immaterial, meaning is only the effect of meaning. How should the castle be viewed in order to really see the castle? How can you look at the forest of shadows? “Which way? Which way?”, asks Alice and asks yet again Alicia, the other Alice.