CaixaForum Barcelona invites you to go down the rabbit hole and go through the mirror to enter the great fantasy world of Alice and her two great adventures that Lewis Carroll told us in Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its continuation, Alice through the looking glass (1871). The “multisensory” exhibition Alice’s worlds, dreaming of wonderlandfrom the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, can be seen until February 16 in Barcelona and from April 3 it will arrive at CaixaForum Madrid. The visitor passes through five thematic areas with 312 objects immersed in an immersive scenography that has a high point, and becomes Alice herself crossing landscapes of amazement. The tour combines magic and surprise with an extraordinary display of documentation about Carroll’s creation, the materializations it has had in art, theater, cinema and fashion, and its relevance to this day, when almost 160 years have passed since the publication of Alice in Wonderland.
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The exhibition is full of clues and suggestions and highlights the “feminist heroine” component of the adventurous, rebellious, brave and rebellious character of Alicia (“I have the right to think!” she exclaims at one point during her adventures) and her reincarnation in new protest identities in the 21st century. Attention is also paid to the scientific dimension of the two stories by Carroll, a mathematician after all, and his relationship with modern theories of time and space, and a universe that seems to escape logic (the rabbit hole as a black hole?). It is recalled that quantum physicists are working on an experiment at the Large Ion Collider called ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment).
On the tour you can find everything from original editions and sketches of the famous illustrations by John Tenniel and the engravings of the Dalziel brothers to Alice’s dress created by Viktor & Rolf for Annie Leibovitz’s session for Vogue in 2003 reinterpreting the character and his world, passing through works by Dalí or Max Ernst (the powerful relevance of Alice in surrealism), or the cover of the Genesis album Nursery Cryme (1971), with a Victorian girl playing croquet with severed heads. Don’t get lost in the same wave of psychedelia as the video of Jefferson Airplane performing White Rabbitin which an eloquent verse says “The pills your mother gives you don’t do anything at all, ask Alicia about hers.” Very interesting is the scope of the great influence on Alice of the Victorian world (travel, nature, queen, ophelias) in which she was born, Lewis Carroll’s relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites (he was a friend of the Rossettis and photographed them; the Alice episode in the train in Alice through the looking glass seems inspired by Millais painting my second sermon), and Hollywood’s transfiguration of the protagonist until culminating in 1951 in the iconic blonde Alice in a dress (inspired by Dior’s 1947 collection) and Walt Disney’s blue eyes. This image contrasts with those that can be seen at the end of the tour of the provocative black Alices portrayed by Tim Walker with styling by Edward Enniful for the 2018 Pirelli calendar. Also with that of the real Alice (brunette), who appears in the portrayed sample as a young man by Julia Margaret Cameron and in 1932 during a trip to the United States, in a photo in which he remembers Mary Poppins.
An aspect of the exhibition about Alice. Alberto Estevez (EFE)
The exhibition includes images of the first Alices in the cinema (the first, barely 10 minutes long, dates from 1903, just four years after the death of Lewis Carroll, in 1933 Cary Grant plays the Artificial Turtle), very interesting Mary Blair’s preparatory work for Disney’s film, in which Aldous Huxley took part, and the explosion of talent and imagination that Tim Burton’s adaptations have brought about, in which, in the role of Mia Wasikowska, she becomes “ warrior of the 21st century.” Along the way, characters such as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, and the clumsy White Knight continue to appear, from their first depictions (the exhibition relates it to the Pre-Raphaelites and Durer’s engraving). The knight, death and the devil), Tararí and Tarará (in English Tweedledum and Tweedledee) or the fragile Zanco Panco (Humpty Dumpty). Theatrical productions about Alice are highlighted and a striking “catwalk” shows dress designs for her (a true “style icon”), such as those by Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada.
Costume designs about Alice’s adventures, in the CaixaForum exhibition.Alberto Estevez (EFE)
If the exhibition can be criticized for anything, it is avoiding some thorns in the rose garden of the Queen of Hearts. There are no references to Deacon Charles Dogson’s (Lewis Carroll’s real name) obsession with young girls and suspicions of pedophilia: a nude photo of Lorina, the older sister of Alicia Liddell (the real Alice), has been attributed to him, and who was also on that “golden afternoon” in July 1862 on a boat ride in Dogson with the three sisters, aged 13, 10 and 8 (the youngest was Edith), when the story was born. It must be remembered that the Liddell family abruptly broke off their relationship with Dogson without any explanation and the snacks ran out. Nor is it addressed that the writer may have experimented with a drug such as opium or hashish, despite the extensive record of consciousness-modifying substances in Alice’s adventures, such as drink, cakes and the mushroom that make her grow or decrease. , not to mention what the Blue Caterpillar smokes in his hookah or what the Mad Hatter carries in his tea (“The tea was strong”). Asked about this by EL PAÍS, the theater commissioner and performance from the Victoria & Albert Museum, Kate Bailey, who presented the exhibition together with the director of CaixaForum Barcelona Mireia Domingo, considered: “Dogson drugs? I don’t think so, he was not part of the bohemia of his time, where there were any, but rather the academy. His thing is the power of imagination. In any case, there is no evidence. Although in the sixties much attention was given to the similarity of Alicia’s experiences with psychedelia, as seen in the exhibition. As for pedophilia, there is no evidence either. Nor does it seem that it should be seen in Alice’s adventures, despite the fact that the exhibition refers in the field of surrealism to her relationship with the unconscious, a sexual key.
Image of Tim Burton’s Alice.
Mireia Domingo has emphasized the interest in Alicia as “a transgenerational reference for fantasy”, has highlighted that the exhibition is “a journey that takes us to impossible places and magical worlds” and reminded her of the importance of the Victoria & Albert as a world reference for the victorian collections. He also explained that CaixaForum’s production of the exhibition includes 25 works that were not in the original exhibition and the creation of the immersive setting “that invites you to feel like Alice for a while”, the work of the set designer and playwright Ignasi Cristià, and that includes a tunnel-burrow made of books, giant furniture, Alice’s sea of tears in digital format, the playing card soldiers of the Queen of Hearts or an amazing representation of the Hatter and the March Hare’s crazy snack.
The exhibition seeks parallels between the current world and Alice’s fantasy and invites us to reflect on whether the protagonist’s universe is really so strange compared to ours. For Kate Bailey, the exhibition is “a trip down the rabbit hole” to a cultural phenomenon of more than a century and a half that the curator has not hesitated to compare with Shakespeare or the Bible, no less, for its influence on the imagination. collective. “The most interesting thing about the exhibition is seeing the lasting impact of these two books in such different disciplines and times,” he stressed.
Babelia
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