9-10.4.2014
with Anne Holtrop
‘Every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.’
Umberto Eco, The Open Work (translation of Opera aperta, 1962)
The workshop Literary Spaces will be about the spaces we imagine in our heads and how through a description they can be directly ‘performed’. It is what Sol LeWitt did with his descriptions for wall drawings. With his act of describing his work solely in text, he included the interpretation of the draughtsmen as the performers of his work. It is this approach that I like where the ‘designing’ is excluded from our practice. In other words we describe what we imagine from our most intuitive and inner self and let this be made as consequence of our fantasies.
A similar approach will be researched and experienced by you. The exercise is very simple: make a description, a text describing a space or a series of spaces. Only by your imagination, the reality in your head, you construct it. The description can contain the proportions, the form, the amount of windows & doors. A minutious description zooming in on every detail in a George Perec kind of way. Or it can be a phenomenological description as in Bachelards Poetics of Space.
The description will be performed and experienced in a large paper model by someone else.