Alicia Kopf: "If someone says that language is something purely human, it's because they haven't lived with an animal."

BarcelonaVisual artist and writer Alicia Kopf (Imma Ávalos, Girona, 1982) returns to bookstores, ending a decade-long hiatus. After the success of Ice Brother, with which he obtained the Documenta Award and the Bookseller's Awardtranslated into ten languages, now publishes Echo's Memoryalso at La Otra Editorial. If you Ice Brother It stemmed from the artistic project Anticantharctic and he dealt with explorations in the North Pole to talk about his relationship with his autistic brother, in Echo's Memory part of the art project Speculative Intimacy (2019-2025) and deals with digitized consciousness to discuss desire and memory. The book, which is framed within autofiction, mixes elements of memoir, essay and novel.

How do you combine artistic projects and literary creation?

— I've always worked this way. The first draft involves exhibitions, images, and a whole bibliography that could be considered academic research. The novel is the final stage because it synthesizes the project's deepest motivations, and I need some perspective to write it. This doesn't mean I'm writing it all the time. Speculative Intimacy It began in 2019 with a solo exhibition at the Joan Prats gallery, where I already showed two of the main videos on technological mediation in human affections.

Interestingly, you say about the visual exhibitions narratives.

— I see my texts visually, and most of them could be video pieces. There are chapters in Echo's Memory which could be put into an artificial intelligence to animate them. My imagination is very visual and then I translate to expo...to video, to story... However, what the novel needs is tension, a dramatic arc, and that comes to me at the end. It takes me three or four years to write it, and the previous two or three were approaches to the theme.

In the book, the protagonist uploads her consciousness to the cloud and recalls her romantic relationship with Adrien, whom she met on a dating site. Digitizing her consciousness allows her to edit her memories.

— This project is closely linked to posthumanist philosophies, which arrived later here, and specifically to three authors: Donna Haraway; Rossi Braidotti, who analyzes human relationships through the lens of science fiction; and Catherine N. Hayles, a literary theorist who has dedicated herself to analyzing technology. They inspired me to create stories that explored relationships with technological entities, such as a boat or a drone.

Are you interested in Braidotti's idea that "science fiction is an extreme metaphor for the relationship with the Other"?

— When we have a romantic relationship, we are relating to an otherness that we must translate, and this is the argument of many science fiction films. the arrival It's a classic example of how writing and language shape experience. I found the themes fascinating and wanted to offer a fresh perspective on intimate relationships. The novel is a privileged territory in this sense, and I thought it would be fun to apply a science fiction filter. A bit like the film. Her, which is a science fiction that is no longer the classic one of traveling to other planets of Ursula K. Le Guin, where there is a political reflection, but is more speculative literature in a less epic vein.

Speculative literature?

— Speculative literature can take place in the near future, but it does not need the most extreme elements of science fiction, although both are characterized by a novelty that can be technological or social. The Maid's TaleMargaret Atwood's novel doesn't need to go to another world: there's a social change that generates a different narrative. That's what interested me, and I wanted to combine it with the literature I'd practiced before and read more of: Annie Ernaux, Anne Carson… Perhaps the operation I've carried out, to put it very simply, would be a hybrid between Annie Ernaux and Le Guin.

The protagonist of the book, Eco, asks herself the following question: "If memory comes from the flesh, who is the one who remembers now?"

— Echo has dematerialized, becoming a voice that could be an AI. But unlike HerThis AI stems from a human consciousness. The power of the novel over film lies in its ability to get inside the characters' heads, and here Eco takes a step beyond the classic consciousness of a character who starts from mimesis, from imitating a human. She knows she is a text.

One of Eco's arguments for uploading consciousness to the cloud is the cost of housing: "For the upload procedure I trust Mnemosyne Labs: the subscription and monthly maintenance cost half as much as renting an apartment in my city."

— Faced with heartbreak, Eco makes a radical, yet ultimately therapeutic, decision. It's not a destructive one, but rather like embarking on a journey. A journey shaped by the current difficulties of city life, which keeps us all in a state of constant stress, especially due to the mismatch between housing prices and salaries. It's a reality I wanted to make explicit. Many of us would accept the pact Eco makes.

It is not the only layer of "reality" in the novel.

— No, there's another one. The story with Adrien takes place in the middle of a future pandemic. What I've done is take things that have happened recently or that seem like science fiction. The pandemic was the most science fiction-like reality we've experienced in recent years because there was a paradigm shift due to a non-human factor, a virus. As a plot in itself, it's brilliant.

And what about the cat that the protagonist adopts?

— The cat serves as a counterpoint to the protagonist's dematerialization. It's a return to materiality, to instinct, to presence, to everything that isn't an image. Animals are indifferent to our virtual and symbolic world, even though they have their own language. I found it very amusing that she spoke to the cat because everyone who has a pet talks to it and understands it. If someone says that language is purely human, it's because they haven't lived with an animal.

Even the word he chooses when he uploads his consciousness to the cloud is "meow".

— Yes, because it has no meaning, but you can create a connection through that word.

Do you want to add anything else to the interview?

— Nothing, mine.

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