Approaches to What?
Reading Bodies Reading Archives
A group intervention into the Broken Dimanche Press self-publishing archive featuring responses by Ally Bisshop, Maria Cerón, Maira Dietrich, Sophie Kitson, Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic and Paula Querido van Erven
Büro BDP
Mareschstrasse 1, 12055, Berlin
19:00 - 21:00
Tuesday 19th of July 2016
What is the life of a book after it’s been read?
What is the temporality of an archive? How can archives speculate on the future?
What are the minor expressions of the archive?
How do you play/perform an archive?
What gestures of care does the archive produce?
What are the spaces of creative rupture in an archive?
How does the ‘stickiness’ of archive objects operate as a navigational tool?
What are the points of linkage between objects in an uncurated archive?
How do you read a book without reading?
What are the more-than-human modes of expression and language given in the materiality of books, of objects?
How does the archive reify / challenge the idea of how a book functions?
How does one create accessibility, availability?
How can the archive offer us advice on how to relate to the world and one another?
How many dimensions has a word, a poem, a text? Is possible to approach it through the interaction/activation of an archive?
How many times can you fold a page onto itself?
Can you make paper works and save your life?
How can we catalogue this archive in a way that it involves a more physical interaction?
What does it mean to ‘save’ a book?
How can the archive be activated with the abstraction of the objects they contain?
What is the space between YES and NO?
What gives the archive authority?
What gets left out of the archive?
What can the archive not capture?
The group investigated the contents of the Broken Dimanche Press self-publishing archive (http://bdparchive.tumblr.com) as a place to encounter new possibilities, new reading materials, and new ways of content display. The spatial design of the site and the archive (comprised of various texts, the majority bound as A5 books) was transformed to incorporate the ‘reading body’ in various ways (through sculptural reinterpretation, performance, installation, sound, and publishing methods). The group responded to different texts and publications in different ways.
https://soundcloud.com/boxxnostik/ghost-frequencies-a-radio-play
I personally responded to a text in the archive called Young, Fresh, and Relevant, edited by Chloe Stead. The publication was a compilation of written contributions by various artists. Inside I found a transcript of a radio play, ‘Ghost Frequencies.’ Playing with ideas around accessibility, the reading body, and activation; I utilised the text to speech program on my computer to read to me without reading, selecting male and female voices as characters to bring to life the text. I tweaked the accents, pacing, timing and intention of the text to make it as performative and discombobulated as possible. The work became a strange autonomous reading body, an audible presence able to fill the archival space with nuance, inflection, and personality without ever having to engage with the original form again.
I included the transcript during the exhibition so visitors could read lines with the characters as they performed the radio play over and over in an infinite and relentless enactment and bastardisation of Andra Quitzimouche’s original text.
A year after the intervention I discovered the original file (or primary source) of Andra’s Ghost Frequencies; an actual radio play that was presented as an interactive sound installation in 2012 (https://soundcloud.com/discombobulatrix/ghost-frequencies). I’d inadvertently responded to the archive the way the original source had been presented, suggesting the life cycle of an archive is never complete even if the interaction is with primary, secondary, or esoteric sources.