On Parafiction 

Salomé Lamas has produced over thirty projects, which have been installed and screened internationally, both in cinema auditoriums and contemporary art galleries, and museums. Each of them gives way to a different social reality, usually characterized by its geographical and political inaccessibility. The artist’s interest in impenetrable, politically ambiguous contexts is guided by concerns and the need to problematize reality that otherwise would not be possible. The web of relations making up the socio-political fabric of her projects is made visible through representational strategies, for which she adopted the term parafiction. Rather than complying with a shapeless meaning of parafiction — for which there is no established terminology — she proposes its expansion and resignification.

In her artistic practice, parafiction can be read in the light of its prefix “para-”, in which we encounter various disruptive effects that are vital for its comprehension. Derived from the Latin, “para-” indicates “alongside, adjacent to, beyond or distinct from, but analogous to”; in certain word combinations, it can also mean “wrong, irregular,” pointing towards an “alteration” or “modification”; further, “para-” implies “separate, defective, irregular, disordered, improper, incorrect, perversion or simulation.” In this way, parafiction would be something in which fiction has been perverted, altered, modified, or pushed beyond its point of reference, as opposed to remaining within the boundaries of the category of fiction. It can also be understood as a “simulation” of fiction, pointing to a distortion of the border around what is considered fiction, thus reaching what is on the other side of that border: that is, the world of non-fiction or seeking the “real” world. Thus, instead of fiction being used to blur the border with non-fiction, it is used as a way of expanding and transcending those boundaries.

Salomé Lamas departs from the principle that we do not have access to a stable reality. Instead, we have an excess of meanings, interpretations, explanations, manipulations, (de)constructions, and evaluations that go into narratives and systems that sustain and occupy us. Consequently, the need for appropriating the idea of parafiction stems from the questioning of how human subjectivity is formed, drawing on psychoanalysis, with the aim of clarifying and expanding concepts such as real (something that is out of reach), reality, symbolic, and imaginary. Thus, she is led to operate at the border between fiction and non-fiction, employing representation and hypothesis generation through certain meditative criteria and a deontological code relative to what is plausible, assuming consciously the “task of the translator” —comparable to illusionism — and pushing its boundaries.

In this context, she draws on distinct non-fictional strategies that include ethnographic research, as well as thought experiments, reflexivity, restaging and performativity, among others, to explore the limits of fiction. This is visible in the development of her working methodology, where we find various manifestations of parafiction, such as scenarios where characters and fictional stories intersect with the world as we are experiencing it. The combination of these strategies, to the detriment of other speculative aspects, forms a sort of hypothesis that maintains a level of accuracy with reality but also questions its authority. Through parafiction it is possible to take a convention and deconstruct it, distort it, expose the impossibility of providing evidence for the truth, to the point where doubts are raised about its validity, yet still producing reasons for understanding it as plausible.

Salomé Lamas problematizes both sides of the border between historical and imaginary worlds, and records how they have changed over time, by understanding parafiction as a fundamental translation tool for defining identity, language and culture. Intensifying, exaggerating and speculating on how the world is made sensible, by triggering moments that reveal their fabrication, in a post-truth context heightened by the technological and globalized nature of our times. To reveal this transformation is a continuous and thorough undertaking, but also spiritual, having the ability to relate the individual sphere (private) with the social sphere (public) and so introducing new information and perspectives on our past, present and future. Thus, although conscious of its limits and apparent contradictions, parafiction helps give form to the chaos of life and endow it with significance, in a compromise between reality and its fictionalization.