An original publication bringing together Esther Ferrer's performance scores and a previously unpublished long-form conversation on creation, language, freedom and action.
Action! A journey through performances is an original editorial project dedicated to the work of Esther Ferrer. The book brings together a selection of performance scores and an extended conversation with the artist conducted by Frédéric Dumond between 2022 and 2024. Developed in close collaboration with Esther Ferrer, the book presents the scores without images, as autonomous texts. Stripped of illustration, they appear in their most direct form: open action structures that can be activated, interpreted and reimagined by anyone. Language operates here fully as performative material.
In dialogue with the conversation, these scores reveal their origins, their transformations and the questions that run through them: freedom, time, the body, simplicity, transmission, feminism, and the possibility of an art inseparable from life itself.
This strong editorial choice rejects any sacralization of the artwork. The scores become available forms—"skeletons for action"—that each person is invited to embody, transform and reinvent. "All versions are valid, including this one," Esther Ferrer states.
Throughout this long-form conversation, Frédéric Dumond adopts a sensitive and direct approach to artistic practice, far removed from academic commentary. The exchange reveals a living, evolving mode of thought shaped by experience, doubt, humour and a constant desire to open the work to other uses and other voices.
At once a book of conversations, a collection of scores and a tool for transmission, Action! A journey through performances invites us less to contemplate a work than to continue it.
A major figure in performance art since the second half of the twentieth century, Esther Ferrer (born 1937 in San Sebastián) has developed a body of work deeply connected to experimentation and freedom, from the years of the ZAJ group to the present day. Her trajectory—marked by the Spanish Civil War, Franco's dictatorship and the protest movements of the 1970s—has shaped an artistic practice attentive both to forms of domination and to spaces of emancipation.
