Thanks to everyone who came to the launch of Archive of Destruction Reader II. It was a lovely, celebratory evening, with many artists, curators, academics, friends and students who have been involved in the project over the last four years.
Rosie Ram, Course Leader (MA Culture, Criticism and Curating at CSM), and Gareth Bell Jones (Director of Flat Time House) gave fantastic talks about the intuitive element of the project, AoD as a playful, provocative, pedagogical tool and an experiment in different modalities of curatorial practice.
I presented a list of what I currently think AoD might be:
a curatorial provocation
a lie
a teaching tool
a soothing balm
a vessel for sadness
a rerouting of endings
a refusal of shame, fear and rejection
an index of reactions to the charge of sculpture
a catalyst for conversations around political and environmental turmoil, social ills, colonial oppression, and institutional conservatism
a refusal of the logic of the market
a tactic of voicing
a mechanism to build a structure for my life’s narrative
an impossibility
a gathering action
a subjective, flawed list
a site of collective memory-making
a repository for the unsaid
a coming to terms with the cracks, fissures and schisms that we find in our dreams, ambitions and emotional states, as well as the physical bodies of sculptures.
To order a copy of the Reader (and support the building of the next one), please visit the Flat Time House website
