Enrique Vila-Matas, Marienbad elettrico – Bastian Schneider, 2021

Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the greatest contemporary European writers, in 2015 agrees to spend almost six months in the company of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, a French artist engaged at that time in the complex preparation of a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. For Vila-Matas, after Kassel does not invite logic, it is a return to the contemporary art scene. Halfway between diary and reflection, essay and narrative, Electric Marienbad is above all a journey to discover the mechanisms of creativity. The text that follows, Bastian Schneider, is a lecture/performance held in 2016 in Lisbon: a new creative step within an artistic collaboration that has lasted over twenty years between Vila-Matas and the French artist. On this occasion, the Spanish writer’s way of making literature becomes more and more explicit: the link between a text and its predecessors, the reference to literary tradition. Also on this occasion Vila-Matas confirms himself as an acrobat of the word.