Talking Cure. Dialogic Archiving as Performative Urban Practice

ATLANTIS MAGAZINE FOR URBANISM & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE #27.3 MARCH 2017 DIALOGUES EXPLORING TOOLS atlantisobject Talking Cure Dialogic Archiving as performative urban practice I will discuss a particular use of Raymond Roussel's novel Locus Solus in the context of Locus Solus Public. Conversations Curatives (Talking Cure), a public intervention project performed in Spring 2009 at Elephant and Castle1, a conlicted inner London borough. Locus Solus can be described as a conceptual literary work, dependent on arbitrary processes which produce the narrative. The novel does not tell us anything about place and urban space . Its operative role in the project is based on its linguistic and performative, rather than narrative space. What happens if we insert the novel, as performative device, in an urban area under regeneration? How can it shift meanings and identities, when actively read and manipulated in gentrifying public space? Locus Solus Public was part of a series of projects that link archive practice with public art. My argument is that the archiving process, conceived as plural and performative, can be an intervention tactic in the public sphere, shifting the emphasis from documentation of a past event, to an experimental process of public making, evolved in the present. 1 The project intervenes in public and social spaces in Elephant and Castle using archival practices and processes of documentation, drifting, translocal exchange of data. Elephant and Castle has been the theatre of one of the most ambitious urban regeneration plans, associated with "new urban colonialism" and the social cleansing of British city centres. The history of gentriication in the area started in 1997 in Aylesbury Estate, the largest social housing estate in Europe. Locus Solus Public project took place during this transitional period of emptying social housing estates from their inhabitants. 2 Plural archiving actions Locus Solus is used as part of a complex strategy to unfold a collective space of archival imagination, through public actions of reading, writing, and rewriting. The archiving scenario involved two groups of acting persons, in-situ archivists and remote writers, working in parallel and together via a wiki-archive, set up during the project. Archivists recorded, transcribed, archived a double city/novel situation, and made the archive public in public space, while its content was constantly reconigured in real time by the second group of remote writers. I will focus on the irst part 41 by Panos Kouros Artist and Art theorist, Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Patras, Greece 1. Aylebury Estate as archive public space; Source: Locus Solus Public; Conversations Curatives, 2009. 2. Archiving actions (acting person: Nora Demjaha); Source: Locus Solus Public; Conversations Curatives, Elephant and Castle, 2009. 3. Archiving supportsurface; Source: Locus Solus Public; Conversations Curatives, 2009. 4. Fencing in Aylebury Estate residents, 2015; Source: https://southwarknotes. wordpress.com atlantisobject 3 of the project, discussing the experimental archiving actions, as they relate to Locus Solus . During site-traversing, archivists are given the task to prepare a textual support-surface2 of the Elephant, using a common internet wiki as archival carrier. Each day, they move without direction in pedestrian space, using streets, construction bypasses, building corridors, blind alleys, etc. They are asked to record and archive various voices and co-utterings in public space. They enter in rooms where tenant meetings take place, in gathering places inside La Bodeguita shopping mall, in public laundries, autonomous spaces, parks or bus stops. They initiate conversations at street intersections, or they set up conditions of confrontation through spontaneous actions. Elephant public utterings form a vast everyday archive. Not accumulating, but selecting and sorting is the fundamental work in archival science3. Let us consider a diagonal documentation method, destabilizing the aesthetic perception of the archivist who collects signiicant fragments in already determined categories . Documenting in the diagonal means unfolding unexpected actions and chance encounters while moving, but also being attentive to insigniicant utterings that resist a thematic centre. Any idea of archival unity is ictional. The diagonal here refers to a certain distraction in perception, made possible by the doubling of the archival ield. Introducing the space of the novel as a parallel to the city archival ield was such a gesture. 'Moving' in the novel shifted the way city archiving proceeded, and moving in the city shifted the way reading paths were followed inside the novel. 4 42 atlantisobject Archiving the novel Archivists are asked to simultaneously read and document the place and the novel. Traversing the space of the novel, producing archival entries: what is the space of the novel? How do we document a novel? There is an apparent narrative space: Archivists walk in real space but they also "move" inside the novel, while reading it; they mirror the group of invited guests in the tour of Locus Solus Estate. Roussel's guests walk in successive loci of the Estate where marvellous mechanisms are described and explained in detail. At the time of traversing, Elephant and Castle was still a place of diversity. Streets and the latino shopping mall were public spaces with dense everyday encounters. Archiving works take place in these loci. There is an evident analogy in the mnemotechnic function of both traversing spaces. Everyday ordinary encounters in Elephant contrast the extra-ordinary narrations in the secluded places of the estate of Locus Solus. However, archiving works in the novel are not undertaken in this narrative space, but in a multilayered textual space, partly disclosed by Roussel, in his book 'Comment J'ai ecrit certains de mes livres,' published posthumously. Roussel described narrative as an elaborate technique of linguistic transformation, cutting of any personal experience of events. He described two processes. The irst describes two identical words with double meanings , where writing a story could begin with the irst and end with the latter."4 He then described a second variation of the evolutionary process, used in Locus Solus: "...I was led to take a random phrase from which I drew images by distorting it, a little as though it were a case of deriving them from the drawings of a rebus.5 The method did make a reappearance in its original form with the word demoiselle considered in two diferent senses; furthermore the second word itself underwent 5 "The time of transmission is the only neutral round of an artistic work." - The Living Archives (W. Borowski, A. Turowski, 1971) a distortion to link it up with the evolutionary method: 1st. Demoiselle (young girl) à prétendant [suitor]; 2nd. demoiselle (pavior's beetle) à reître en dents [soldier of fortune in teeth]."6 The word prétendant does not appear in the novel. Roussel's technique can be thought of as a process of continuous repetition and displacement. Anything he heard or read by chance in his everyday movements, any found language, could serve as initial material to be performed. We become aware of the existence of a hidden network of banal everyday utterances, encountered by chance. The narrative is thus the outcome of the performative linguistic machine. Roussel's project is at the same time the textual 5. Sealing up of walkways, Aylesbury Estate, 2012; Source: https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com 6. Aylesbury Estate protest, 2015; Source: https://ightfortheaylesbury.wordpress. com 6 43 7. Aylebury Estate as archive public space; Source: Locus Solus Public; Conversations Curatives, 2009. atlantisobject production and the product-text. The posthumous meta-discourse of Comment... has a principal conceptual role in the reading of Locus Solus. It transfers the performative dimension from the process of writing to the act of reading. Each word becomes, thus, the echo of an absent past layer of association of elements . During their traversing, archivists know that Roussel, in his Comment... book, archived certain fragments as paradigms of his hidden method. They also know that Locus Solus is a vast visible array of detourned traces of actuality, readings, scientiic theories, urban actualities, and political events. "These encyclopedic fragments come in the inside of the book in an often perverse way: the allusions are rarely simple and direct, but mostly detourned."7 Their task is to extract, to excavate, to document what they assume are traces of this resonant empty space8, without referring to the speciic missing language. If the "phonetic fragments of this irst language, sparkling, without our knowing where (...) are displayed in the enchanted surface", as Foucault eloquently writes,9 the archiving task is to correspond to such signiiers. 7 References 1. Panos Kouros. “Locus Solus Public: Conversations Curatives”, performative archiving actions, Elephant and Castle, 2009. Out of the Box Intermedia, London Festival of Europe. (Acting persons: Elena Chronopoulou, Nora Demjaha, Giota Dimitropoulou, Athena Kokla). Archival desistance 2. The function of the archival wiki surface can be compared to a minimalist work, in the sense of a formalized system of reiterations and modiications. During their walks, archivists used a slightly modiied, ready-made wiki to place the Elephant and Locus Solus indings. The relative position of fragments is not ixed. This is an archival surface which keeps elemental metadata and a non-hierarchical structure; it resembles the act of disassembling an archive in order to carry it. Archivists bring fragments of two extraneous spaces in proximity. Resonant signiiers of a missing language from the a-temporal Locus Solus spaces are juxtaposed to insigniicant utterings in Elephant's social spaces. The wiki functions as a neutral archival support-surface,10 open to reiterations. By using the term support/surface, I allude to the speciic art movement, and the idea of a performative manual intervention in rolled or unfolding surfaces. 3. See Wolfgang Ernst, Underway to the Dual System. Classical Archives and/or Digital Memory. In: Net Pioneers 1.0. Contextualizing Early NetBased Art (ed. Dieter Daniels & Gunther Reisinger) Sternberg Press, 2010. 4. Raymond Roussel. How I Wrote Certain of My Books (ed. Trevor Winkield). Exact Change: Cambridge MA, 1995, p. 3-4. 5. Ibid. p. 12. 6. Ibid. p. 16. 7. Patrick Besnier, Pierre Bazantay, Petit Dictionnaire de Locus Solus. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993, p. 18. 8. Foucault described the space of the novel as an empty space, " arranged inside language, which opens in the interior of the word this insidious, deserted The wiki function does not separate storage from use. The initially constructed topology of fragments is reconigured again and again by the writers. Any re-writing trope11 may be used for any archival content. New archival recensions are produced by this polyphonic (and antagonistic) public performance. An archive public gathers in the Aylesbury Estate private garage doors, where copies of archiving recensions are attached. Elephant utterings become important for their generative, transformative potential, and not for their preservation in a culture of documents. The only remaining resident in Aylesbury had to be forcibly evicted from his home in 2013. Paradoxically, the condensed time of the archival performance is a slow-down in the stream of events during an efective regeneration process.12 Archiving can be seen as an act of desistance. • and trap-like emptiness. (My translation). Michel Foucault. Raymond Roussel. Paris: Gallimard, 1963, p.24. 9. Michel Foucault. The Death and the Labyrinth. The world of Raymond Roussel. London New York: Continuum. p. 45. literal ‘metaphorization’ of the archive 10. On the notion of archival desistence as an organized neutral zone for performative archival action, see: Panos Kouros. Desistence of Living Archives. Keynote lecture, Symposium Archive Public II, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2013. 11. Locus Solus [Mnemeden] was a modiied version of an algorithmic machine used in Mnemeden project (2002). It was operated through the archiving support-surface. 12. The same location was used by archivists as a Locus Solus reading space, initiating discussions in front of each resident's garage space, as part of the collecting acts. Locus Solus irst appeared in a fragmented form, as a serial (feuilleton) in Gaulois du Dimanche, with the title: Quelques heures a Bougival. "It passed completely unremarked", Roussel wrote in Comment... 13. For the recent evictions, occupation events and fencing-in of residents A complete version of this text was presented at the Reading Architecture Symposium, organized by the History and Theory Program, School of Architecture, McGill University at Benaki Museum, Athens, on 16th June 2015. in Aylesbury Estate blocks, see: https://southwarknotes.wordpress. com/2015/04/01/aylesbury-estate-is-everyones-ight/ and https:// ightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/what-next-on-theaylesbury-article-from-southwark-notes/ [accessed May 2015] 44