Creation Residence  
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This is water
L'animal a l'esquena (Celrà)
From 03/06/2019 to 07/06/2019

Juan Navarro, Gonzalo Cunill
( Juan Navarro, Gonzalo Cunill )


There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is Water. D.F. Wallace

Juan Navarro and Gonzalo Cunill will work together again on a performance project, this time with the aim of taking a closer look at the life and work of the author of Infinite Jest. Their starting point is the lecture This is Water, which David Foster Wallace delivered on 21st May 2005 at the graduation ceremony for the prestigious Kenyon College in Ohio. That day, Wallace proposed facing the fact that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about”. On this occasion we find him lively and optimistic, far from the demons that tortured him until his suicide in 2008.



Juan Navarro and Gonzalo Cunill will use this humanist testimony, his lecture, as basic material from which to construct a drama that traces a journey through a selection of fragments, stories and situations taken from his literary work Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

David Foster Wallace (New York 1962-2008) is an author who, from his very first work, The Broom of the System (1987), demonstrated a talent hungry for experiment in his personal search for language. His university studies centred around literature and philosophy, though with a focus on maths and logic, and he also gained a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987. His most famous book, Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is considered a cult novel in the English language. Wallace committed suicide in 2008 when, after 20 years of treatment for depression, a change in his medication intensified his illness.

His best known works are: The Pale King, Girl with Curious Hair, Consider the Lobster, and A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again.