An AIU exclusive. Written by Jorge Artajo in 1997

When I went to visit the "En Trance" and "Ex It" exhibitions in Alicante and Valencia (Spain 1997), my wife and I took a lot of photographs of ourselves inside the exhibitions, which was a hard task because on one side I am very shy and I feel very uncomfortable when I'm posing, and on the other hand we thought it was forbidden to take photographs inside the exhibitions, so we hid from the guards. Silly of us, because there were video cameras all over the place, but we were so excited that we didn't realize that. We took photos of ourselves hanging wishes on the "Wish Tree", (an olive tree that was overcrowded with whishes); sitting at the chess tables of "Play It By Trust"; we lie on the floor between the piles of river stones of "Cleaning Piece" and we tried the different "entrances" (AIU note: of the installation piece by Yoko Ono titled En Trance). It was a lot of fun, but I felt a little guilty, because for making this trip I missed the wedding of one of my best friends. I hate weddings and I love the work of Yoko Ono, so for me the choice was very clear but at the same time I thought that sometimes it is necessary to make little efforts and do things that we don't like in order to please the ones we love, but this time was too much to ask. So in order to end the guilty feeling, I made to my friend a beautiful handmade portfolio that I filled with drawings and nonsense poetry when we returned from our trip. My friend loved my gift very much, she forgave me and told me that now she was very happy I didn't go to her wedding, because she prefer to have this collection of drawings. One of the drawings was this kind of collage I made as a memory of my visit to Yoko Ono's exhibitions which I titled: "The story of the guest who didn't go to the wedding, but celebrated it hundred miles away (under the spell of Yoko Ono)".

The funny thing is that days later we realized that the camera didn't have a reel, so there were no photographs and this drawing is the only material memory that we have of that trip.

Jorge's artwork, inspired by this exhibition by Yoko Ono