My (no) wedding arose first as a result of the personal need for an intimate catharsis. A friend gave me her wedding dress for my thirtieth birthday; she had married twice and was divorcing for the second time, so I understood that her gift responded to the need to make a symbolic gesture that would impel her desire to free herself from her past and thus be able to move forward. That dress would soon confront me with a personal trauma.

I had tried to provoke a wedding with the man with whom she had shared ten years of her life, a relationship that was disintegrating without anyone being able to remedy it. The dress occupied, energetically speaking, a main place in the house, like a ghost that had happened to inhabit it. One day she decided to face him. She understood that if I wanted to advance in my life, I had to make that frustrated wedding. That “consecration of love” that could have been and never was and never would be— unless it was through a (not) symbolic wedding, an act that could only be artistic, poetic, magical, and also playful. Yes, above all, playful! There is nothing more cathartic, more wonderfully liberating, than humor.

A society that aspires to be more conscious of itself, more coherent and, ultimately, more mature, needs to work with the imaginary that underlies the collective unconscious. Those images or emblems are so rooted in our collective imagination that they exert an almost supernatural power over our consciences. Then our consciences, possessed and configured by them, push us to comply with these models. In this sense, life is one long trance.