The Joycean Society, video work by Dora Garcia, is a film about a book club dedicated to Finnegans Wake, a society made up of students, admirers and connoisseurs of what is often said to be 'the most difficult book in the world'. The video is a condensation of her long-standing investigation inspired by James Joyce and his fundamental contribution to contemporary culture. A group of people have been reading a book together for thirty years. They have been reading it again and again, with each journey from the first to the last page taking eleven years. Once they reach the last word, a very enigmatic "the", they begin again with the first word, "riverrun." The text appears inexhaustible, its interpretation endless, the inconclusive nature of the reading exciting. The world seems to cease existing outside this reading room or, perhaps, it exists because of it. Dora Garcia explains: "I find in The Joycean Society and the core of the research, which are the Finnegans Wake reading groups, the subjects with which I have been working since the very beginning. These are language, language as a maker of society, language as a password for secret societies, language as a translator of the real, and perhaps as a creator of the real, language as a structure of the subconscious, poetry, poetry as disease, poetry as deviancy of language, poetry as dysphasia, poetry as a substitute for life, code, code as a recognition technique, code as a selection of receptors, code as a secret, code as what reveals… I think this both ancestral and supermodern collective reading of the Finnegans Wake is a statement about what matters in life and it is therefore political."

A book, partially amputated, inspired by the classical pocket editions by Penguin Books, accompanies the project. Edited by Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in complicity with Dora Garcia, it includes texts by Anna Daneri, Emiliano Battista, Eva Fabbris, Chantal Pontbriand and Abdellah Karroum.