This video by Dora García documents a performance, which is enacted by a narrator willing to recite... “all the stories in the world”. For the recording she selected forty of the three thousand stories she has up to now gathered, which can be read in the web page conceived by the author herself, and which functions as a hypertext.

An individual who could be anyone, neutrally dressed, recites infinite narrations. In spite of giving in to this mental, imaginary world... the body is not dispensed with. The only image on screen is that of the narrator, whose physical presence and voice is emphasised: his vocalisation, his breathing, the movement of his body parts in the neutral space. In refusing to evoke the narrations through images, this video lends all its power to the spoken, almost liturgic, word, and to its capacity to create double fictions and realities.

Infinite time loops, lives on the edge between reality and fiction; these are some of the subjects that Garcia has been most involved with. Some of these stories have as many folds as the structure upholding them: “A man dreams all his life the same dream. He even thinks that he is actually living two lives, one interrupting the other when he sleeps or wakes up”. Obsessions that remind us of Borges in his search for the absolute book. He once wrote: “I don’t find it unlikely that there is lying on some shelf in this universe a total book; I plead to the gods that one man - just one, even if it has been a thousand years ago! - has read it”. Whitman also comes to mind: “These are really the thoughts of all men of all ages and lands”.

The video, far from being a closed work, is the resonance of a project of an unfinished character, a project always open, which survives in our minds for a long time: “A man, a woman, recites out loud all the stories in the world. When she finishes, all the stories, all the men and all the women, all the time and all the places will have gone through her lips”.