liquid architecture paula szturc
reading waiting
fol lowing touching winding roads
If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line – and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our ever- changing hiding places. Carlo Levi, from his introduction to Italian edition of Tristram Shandy , quoted by Italo Calvino in ‘Quickness’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium , trans. Geoffrey Brock. London: Penguin Classics, 2016. p 57
This offering brings forward two points from my rather meandric readings. Both moments can be characterised by holding onto the gesture of searching (not synonymous with scrolling). Searching embeds me in the curatorial, historical and particular spatial contexts within the collection I am studying. 1 The relevance of this endeavour is determined by the dimensions of proximity. Repeating Vilém Flusser – ‘proximity measures my hope, my fear, my plans’. 2
Paula Szturc
1 Temporary closures of Scottish public institutions and universities libraries mid-2020 shifted my ways of organising, archiving and accessing sources, resulting in temporary assemblages that became frighteningly permanent each day. In a collaborative doctoral programme that focuses on a collection of Dada and Surrealist publications drawn from the book collections of Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller, and housed at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the institutional and physical distance between the space of the collection and me, gave a sense of urgency and another dimension to my work. 2 Vilém Flusser, ‘The Gesture of Searching ’ , in Gestures , trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. p 157
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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