M HKA Ensembles

Artist Novel, 21 x 14 cm, 192 p., language: Spanish, publisher: Mansalva Editorial, Buenos Aires, ISBN: 9789878337234.

Collection: M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2031/772).

Literary synopsis

El tamaño de mi mundo (The Size of my World) is not gonzo journalism (although the author is naked), nor is it a life story (nothing to do with Los hijos de Sánchez by Oscar Lewis, here in the family, nothing) or non-fiction text (a genre that often deals with front-page illegalities). It is a thesis on the trade of stripper, from the suburbs to the center, with the testimony of a certain Ulises del Toro, his tragic saga of object man and fucker-accountant (although he studied the career, his accounting was for women), written by a sociologist-artist-writer who does not make moral differences between Marx's Capital and the world as size, that is, the ability to use the bulge as a hanger for underpants to the rhythm of Back in Black. In the midst of the feminist revolution, this book is a tender retro biography of the dick: her wiry and blind heyday, her pumping skills as a specialized worker, her senile chemical fortitude, her withered living death.

Stage? Among others, the Golden bowling alley where women howl and pounce on their favorite bulges, making believe, as they have done for centuries, that these carnal gadgets give them orgasms as quickly as the protagonist of When Harry Met Sally exemplifies at the table from a restaurant.

"I'm still not sure if when I started working as a stripper, I did it to write my thesis or because I always liked to show off," begins the author, whose stripper name was León Anaconda. That irony is nothing more than affected modesty: behind it is an ethic that tries to blur the limits between experience and ethnography, testimony and fiction.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

The artist's novel is part of Syd Krochmalny's artistic research project, which is expanded with other media (such as painting and performance) and materials.

Novel's website