Luciana Janaqui news | introduction | experiments | exhibitions | CV | contact She reads a diary of mine, theirs, or perhaps her own 2018, performance I participated in a residency program at Matadero in Madrid from October to November in 2018. This is a performance that I staged throughout the two-hour open studio held around the end of the program. During my stay, I was working on a project called mi El Camino, whose main element is a notebook containing a diary written in Japanese. In this performance, this diary was verbally translated into Spanish live, while it might have looked as if it was just read out. It is “my” diary, but composed of other people's diaries. In mi El Camino, while walking the Camino de Santiago I tried to reenact stories and events described in diaries written by former pilgrims that I collected from the Internet. In the notebook, by physically cutting and pasting fragments of their printed texts, I recorded the entire process of my pilgrimage, from the day 0 to the day 31. The events that happened only to me were added by my handwriting. Therefore, it is a collage of my diary and others’, or I could call it “our” diary. During the performance, the person who was reading this diary, while translating it improvisationally, was a Japanese lady who was based in Madrid, as yet another personality involved (the spectators might have misunderstood she was the artist, Luciana Janaqui). I didn’t ask her, but perhaps she had experienced the same pilgrimage in the past. If so, even though she was reading the diary of mine / diaries of the past pilgrims whose memories I borrowed, it is possible that her voice was somehow covering bits of her own pilgrimage stories. This way, I formulated a configuration where the ownership of the stories was kept ambiguous. Along with this performance, I presented thirty nine photos that document all the pages of the diary and drawings based on photos taken by former pilgrims and me. Furthermore, as an introduction to the entire project, I transcribed on the wall by hand my diary entry on the day 32, the only entry composed solely of my own words, which is not included in the notebook.