Finding the Erotic at LIDL: Georges Bataille and the Natural World

Finding the Erotic at LIDL: Georges Bataille and the Natural World



I often have this one particular thought and it usually occurs to me in the checkout of the Lidl around the corner from my office, and the thought kind of goes something like: these fellow shoppers, placing on the checkout conveyer belt all their canned goods, detergent, toilet paper and so on, bright and shiny in plastics and packaging, what are their sex lives made of, how do their bodies appear naked, fornicating, rubbing on top of another body and in turn being rubbed? And this thought leads on to another, somehow logically connected question: what do their bodies smell like, the crevices, the rolls of flesh out of sight thanks to their stone-washed denims, their ersatz tracksuits?

Tales Told in the Telling

Tales Told in the Telling: Fictional Strategies

A Creative Writing Workshop as Part of the Self-Publishing Archive

March 26, 11-17h

Buro BDP

This one-day (somewhat open and experimental) workshop looks at, reads and potentially initiates fictional strategies as a way to advance artistic practices and discourse. Not limiting itself to either the domain of contemporary visual art or literary / poetic fiction, but rather investigating the intersection, crossovers and contamination of both, the workshop is comprised of a close reading of selected texts chosen by workshop leader John Holten. These texts will be made available a week in advance of the session and hopefully will offer various diverse ways of thinking how fiction both operates and generates itself, as well as how it has been used to further the practice of a number of past and contemporary practitioners in a number of media and fields.

Depending on how the initial session develops there is the possibility that in the future the workshop will include the reading of participants’ work and feedback sessions, as well as looking at material ways of bringing fictional strategies into the world, for instance self publishing techniques, interventions, performance and filmmaking.

To apply please send a brief biographical paragraph and a recent example of visual or textual artistic output. Space is limited to a maximum of 10 participants. A donation of 15/EUR is suggested upon acceptance to attend the workshop.

John Holten co-founded the Berlin art publishing project Broken Dimanche Press in 2009 which published his novel The Readymades in 2009 and his follow up, Oslo, Norway, in 2015. The LGB Group, a fictitious art group created for The Readymades (with Darko Dragičević), has enjoyed exhibitions internationally including The Armory Show, New York. His writing has appeared in many national and international publications. Holten is also known for his collaborative art projects and his work has appeared in the Malmö Konsthall, David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), Villa Romana, Florence, Plan B Gallery, Berlin, San Serriffe, Amsterdam amongst others. He lives in Berlin.

Reading and viewing material will centre around three areas:

SHUDDERING INTO EXISTENCE:

Ed Atkins, Even Pricks (text)

Ed Atkins, Even Pricks (video)

Supporting work: Roberto Bolano, Illness + Literature = Illness

SILLY WHITE MEN AND THE TALES THEY TELL:

Renzo Marten's Episode III: Enjoy Poverty

 Supporting work: Louis Althusser The Future Lasts Forever

THE ARTWORK AS PULP NOVEL:

K.D., Headless

 Supporting work: The Book Lover's Project (David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska)

APOCOLYPSE NOW:

Loretta Fahrenholz' Ditch Plains 

 Supporting work: Ben Lerner's 10:04

Out of Radiant in Your +1 Some Berlin-Based International Writing (Gully Havoc)

I wrote a piece while listening to Ben Frost's Aurora in order to write an advanced press text. I also wrote 'Out of Radiant' a broken short story in the form of these prose islands, recently published in the anthology Your +1: Some Berlin-Based International Writing (Gully Havoc). I also got to travel to Iceland for the recording of the official videos of the album back in November 2013, shot on the same Kodak film as Richard Mosse's The Enclave. Direction and editing was carried out by Trevor Tweeten and Richard Mosse.

Available here

Interview with Renko Heuer in Lodown Magazine 98

The Lit Corner: John Holten

TRUE NORSE

“Let us introduce a street. It is dark with figures moving down its incline. It is in the east of the city and connects neighborhoods. The figures are returning home, their hands touch each other, entwine. A smile appears in the dark.”

“If this story could occupy a space other than this page, objects could also help fill the void; how I would like to tell it with knives and pens and tables, soiled underwear and rusting oil platforms, the agitated air between my face and my computer screen, how, dear reader, I would like to throw a urinal at you”: Having blown up the outlines of the “traditional” novel before with his amazing “The Readymades” debut (2011), Irish-born, Berlin-based author/publisher/jack-of-all-trades John Holten has returned this summer with “Oslo, Norway,” his second, significantly shorter and even more open-ended work that “gets on with things” in other ways: What starts out as a fairly straightforward story about protagonist William Day’s expat experiences in the Norwegian capital, his falling in and out of love, soon folds and unfolds into a proper, self-styled “literary atlas,” (partly inspired by J. Schalansky), a speculative and shape-shifting map about story-telling itself (including writer’s block), “stories in space,” with different episodes and sections, including the map’s Legend at the end.

The result, again, not only leaves the page via Holten’s accompanying “Blips” (DIY video/pseudo commercials) but also leads the protagonist, the book’s author (and “first reader”: John Holten), and ultimately, us, to other areas by involving Norse mythology, Kafka, Bolaño, and more, thus raising questions about the possibilities of novel itself (yes, lovers of metafiction, rejoice!). Also serving as the second installment of what’s eventually to become his “Ragnarök” trilogy, we once again caught up with the founder of Broken Dimanche Press to discuss his various other projects, actual bin collecting in Oslo, and selfie fiction.

“What makes William Day real and knowable to us is the fact that he is moving through space, a coordinate on the map”… now that you’re currently back on the road, a coordinate on the map, does life somehow feel more real and knowable – to yourself as well? How’s life been since we last spoke anyway?

I think moving is so important to producing work, yet at the same time writing kind of needs a sedentary time. For fictional characters, their psychology only really comes to me if I put them in space and have them do things and “Oslo, Norway” is all about moving through space, both geographically and paginal. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since last we talked, I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin which is both a good and bad thing. I traveled to Democratic Republic of Congo with Richard Mosse, Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost to assist on the making of “The Enclave,” Richard’s work for the Venice Biennale, already two years ago now. That was an insane creative process to be involved in, and very good to move off the coordinates of Western Europe. I think I’d love to spend more time in Africa and Latin America because up until now I’ve been in my comfort zone a lot.

And right now you’re in NYC, right?

Yeah, I’m launching “Oslo, Norway” next week, but also doing a number of events around town with my sister Katie with whom I finally got around to making a book with, “About Trees”.  

It’s been four years since “The Readymades” came out, and ever since you seem to have been involved with so many things, so many events and releases and such, how much time do you actually dedicate to writing? What about your practice as a writer, and how has it changed and evolved over the past five years?

Yeah I can barely finish these questions because I’m constantly jumping online and moving around my computer’s desktop. My writing has seriously been influenced by all the working collaborations and publishing work I’ve done over the last five years. Those and the internet. I really need deadlines now, with “The Readymades,” and also I guess “Oslo,” I was writing for myself, and nobody else. Even publishing with BDP is a form of self-publishing which means I have had even greater freedom. There’s a responsibly there, to see your work through, to its highest potential. 

I love the fact that “Oslo, Norway” is a literary atlas of sorts – a map you can enter at any given point. What inspired this form/format, and did you get lost in your own mappings as you were creating it?

The novel, and the printed book, needs to get on with things. With “The Readymades,” the structure was so elaborate and intricate, the actual end of the book happened in the middle and the real meaning of the character’s suicide is easily lost. A lot of people stop reading “The Readymades” after 100 pages. It’s a hard book to read, for different reasons, and especially if, like a lot of my readers, English is not your first language. This got me thinking about what happens to a novel when it isn’t finished. In video art this happens also: audiences sit for 30 seconds of a video installation in a gallery and then move on. With Richard’s “The Enclave,” there was a lot talk about having it open ended and allowing the viewer to move through the space and create their own edit. It has six screens, and in a way it’s impossible to view all of them all at the same time. I wanted Oslo to be fundamentally contemporary: people read mostly on a screen, in a tab: the space of reading has changed, and my novel had to reflect this. So what better form than a street atlas to give agency to the reader? You get the picture incrementally, meaning is built up and composed as you may need it, as the road runs to the edge of the page, so you jump forward to where it reappears on the next section of the terrain. I tried to sequence the story and even had an idea that each issue of the book would have a random ordering of the 52 sections and digitally print them, but ultimately it’s got these four sections each with 13 episodes, the first three sections are different sorts of representations (represented in pronominal perspective) and the last section is the Legend or key, where I give the game away, so to speak.  

Don’t you think it’s also part of the fun to be guided by an author, to trust his voice and choices along the numbers on the bottom of the pages?

For sure, I love genre and playing with genre. I think both my books can be read very linearly and I want pleasure to be gained from reading my books. Bolaño thought me that, and that’s what he did so wonderfully.  

You’d been to Oslo before coming to Berlin, right? Or did you explore the city more recently? How much time did you actually spend there vs. how much time did you look at maps later on?

Yeah I’ve been to Oslo a lot, it always felt like a very familiar city. I went back to record some of the Blips, my tongue in cheek marketing campaign and foray into making video art. I was going for the whole “they’re so bad they’re good” kind of thing, which is kind of beside the point. It was just fun to do them. 

And the actual book, how much of it was already shaping up while you were there? And when not working on chapters, you were packing fish and collecting bins?

Yeah I did a lot in Oslo. From the very first day I visited in 2004 to visit my university buddy, the writer and curator Lars Mørch Finborud, the city has always offered me new experiences. Radically new experiences, if you know what I mean. I packed salmon destined for Brazil on the Fillipstad docks, watching the new Astrup Fearnley Museet being built out into the fjord. I also collected bins, that’s true. I was too fucking good at it, I realized I was copying the bin men I’ve always seen and kind of ran fast and jumped a little too eagerly onto the back of the truck. Totally in line with Sartre’s concept of mauvaise foi – I was acting in bad faith, acting. I worked with a nice guy, but then he told me the band he had been in – Norwegian Black Metal has some serious bat shit history! Oslo is intense, sure it’s expensive, but it’s also at base a port town, Norwegians travel, and people travel to Norway – it’s a very open and progressive place.

“Words, that is, writing. If I could I would do without.” Really? And are there moments when you can, things you do that make you feel that way?

Yeah sure, make art. With “The Readymades” Darko and I collaborated on bringing the fiction into galleries, bookshops and ultimately even The Armory Show in NYC. The LGB Group have had a very successful art career! It’s the same with the Blips. And the drawings. It gets back to space, putting things in space, even characters as well as myself, as I said before. Movement helps.

Still, do you feel like an author first – or more like an artist who happens to be writing and publishing some good ol’ books?

Yes I am a novelist first and foremost, I feel that has always been my goal: to write books, novels. But I don’t see the great need to distinguish between “artist” and everything else. I’m an artist, like everyone else.

Was it easy to see where the dividing line between novel as “on-going fictitious event” and personal life needed to be drawn?

With “The Readymades” we certainly got ourselves tangled up in what was real and what was made up, Darko and I had moments of peculiar, full-blown confusion and I liked that. The ghost of Djordje Bojic is very present when I look back at the “Readymades” project. For “Oslo,” I wanted to reverse the fiction, and really I started with myself and let the event take it where it had to go. But could a novel affect my real life? I think writing it could, and I talk about that in the novel. It’s an intriguing result: to document reality you have to leave it behind and create something out of nothing, only to in turn see reality presented anew. 

What did you learn about publishing and especially self-publishing since starting BDP and launching pt. 1 of the Ragnarök trilogy, “The Readymades”?

I guess I have learned an incredible amount. I also find this a hard question to answer. There are technical things about publishing that aren’t all that interesting. I’ve learned that I prefer being an artist and writer before being a publisher mainly because I think with publishing comes a large responsibility and to split that with the responsibility I have toward my own art is a huge, sometimes overwhelming, challenge. But I’ve learned also that self-publishing works, it’s worth doing what you need to do in order to get your work to its audience. It’s a brilliant time for art publishing. I’ve just spent three weeks in NYC and the coolest thing I saw was the New York Art Book Fair in MOMA PS1!

And so you’re currently working on part three of that trilogy? Is it really going to be a Berlin utopia? And what about your relationship to the no. 3?

I haven’t really even started. I need to clear up my publishing duties and get down to the writing. It starts with a lot of reading and research and generally just dreaming stuff up. It’s going to be dense, I want it to be a large canvas after the exactitude of “Oslo”. It may deal with evil and train networks.  

One other thing: Do you think the return of meta-fictional elements (if they were ever really gone) is something we should now call “selfie fiction”?

I think the word selfie is kind of considered fickle somehow, I’m not sure there is a lot of respect given to the word. We are in an age in which we kind of revel in our narcissism, and I think it’s important for artists to get their vanity in place. A lot of bad art is given to the world because the artist is trying to be coy about their vanity and narcissism – auto fiction is a good enough term. I think selfie fiction could definitely be used to describe a lot of Instagram accounts.

Words/interview: Renko Heuer

John Holten / “Oslo, Norway” / novel / Broken Dimanche Press

brokendimanche.eu

Review of Oslo, Norway in Structo

Oslo, Norway, the second in Holten’s Ragnarok trilogy that began with the widely acclaimed The Readymades, cleverly gathers romance, cartography and Nordic myth in a meta-fictional retelling or interpretation of the streets of the eponymous capital. A self-aware tale of love and the fictions that are told in the process of it, the novel will be enjoyed by readers of Bolaño, Cortázar and Calvino and should be attempted by others... Continue reading here.

The Pulse of Words Evaporate, 2015, tape on wall, dimensions variable.

Sans Serriffe, Amsterdam

16.11.2015 John Holten reads from OSLO, NORWAY

13:00—14:00

John Holten published his first novel The Readymades in 2011 (with artwork by Darko Dragicevic). The art group he created in the novel, The LGB Group, enjoyed exhibitions in many cities as well as being included in The Armory Show, New York in 2012.

Oslo, Norway is his second novel and is an intriguing story of love and loss that begins in the affluent and rapidly growing city of Oslo, Norway. It follows the story of William Day, an economic migrant who moves to the city to work as a mechanical engineer before chance thrusts him into the alluring world of Sybille and her artist friend Camille. As they do their best to reconcile growing differences in personality and culture, Camille’s growing influence over Sybille threatens the relationship, before her dangerous friends in the Oslo underworld finally undo William’s search for stability. This sets William – and the reader – in the direction of the novel’s horizon, which is set outside of historical time and space, taking in the history of oil exploration, Norse mythology, coronal mass ejections and post-apocalyptic landscapes.     

As well as working as an editor, John Holten has written collaborative texts for a number of artists and his writing has appeared in numerous publications. His work has appeared in many international contemporary art settings such as Malmö konsthall, The White Building London, David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), NGBK and Agora, Berlin and Villa Romana, Florence amongst others. His video commercials for Oslo, Norway have been exhibited in Plan B Gallery and Team Titanic, Berlin, Extrapool, Nijmegen and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.

A Soft Tragedy

#ASoftTragedy #latergram #kinderhookcaracas #projectspacefestival #OlgaBalema #PatrickBurkhardt #PieterJanGrandry #EthanHayesChute #JohnHolten #MirakJamal #ValentinaKarga #HanneLippard #DafnaMaimon #MichelleDiMenna #AntoineRenard #SantiagoTaccetti #ClémencedeLaTourduPin #AlexTurgeon #ElviaWilk pict by @ehc2000

A photo posted by Lorenzo Sandoval (@lorenzo__sandoval) on Aug 17, 2015 at 3:10pm PDT

Exhibition and Book Launch: Oslo, Norway

Oslo, Norway: Exhibition and Book Launch

• Saturday, April 25, 2015
• 3:00pm  10:00pm
• Büro BDP 

In November 2011 Darko Dragičević and John Holten carried out ‘It’ s Already A Success!’, a weeklong reading of the entire novel The Readymades as part of an exhibition by The LGB Group at the legendary Gallery D.O.R. in Brussels. For the first international release of his follow up novel, Oslo, Norway, Holten will once more read a novel in full. Echoing not only the earlier performance, but also contemporary writer Travis Jeppeson, who has read his novel The Suiciders in full at various venues, the performance posits a total exposure of the literary work, allowing the audience to come and go, converse and drink a glass of wine over a period of several hours for durations of their choosing. This is not so much a comment on the contested audience expectation for free content, but an investigation into new modes of attention and readership, how one can go about performing a novel, as well as subverting the social expectations of a traditional book launch.

Alongside the reading will be a screening of ‘Blips’, a series of pseudo commercials Holten produced and screened over the last two years. These have been screened individually in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, (Blip # 4); Extrapool, Nijmegan (Blip#3); Team Titanic, Berlin (Blip # 2) and Galerie Plan B, Berlin (Blip# 1). These will be slowed down to approach the length of the reading, a mixture of footage from Oslo and extracts from the novel, they counteract and draw out what the audience may or may not hear depending on the length they listen.

Oslo, Norway takes the form of a literary atlas, telling its stories over 39 sections titled after streets and places around Oslo and its environs. These are included at the beginning of each of the three sections of the book and the original drawings will also be on display, along with other totem like iterations of the book. In line with Holten’s practice, all aspects of the book and its creation are presented over the course of the performance and exhibition heralding, as does the form of the novel, a new mode of reading, one that is inherently based on life online and how the majority of textual matter is now read, bringing that into an offline, durational and haptic literary experience.

John Holten is a writer and artist as well as a publisher. Born in 1984 in Ireland, he studied at University College Dublin and the Sorbonne-Paris IV before obtaining an MPhil from Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 he published his first novel The Readymades to great acclaim, and the art group he created in the novel (with Darko Dragičević), The LGB Group, enjoyed exhibitions in many cities as well as being included in The Armory Show, New York in 2012. Known for his collaborative projects, Holten has written for many artists such as Natalie Czech, Mahony, Darri Lorenzen and Jani Ruscica, often working closely with them to produce immersive or participatory texts. His work has appeared in many international contemporary art settings such as Malmö konsthall, The White Building London, David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), NGBK and Agora, Berlin and Villa Romana, Florence amongst others. Having co-founded Broken Dimanche Press as an international art press in 2009, he has overseen as Editor-In-Chief more than thirty publications and attendant exhibitions, projects and public events. In 2012 he travelled to the Congo with artist Richard Mosse for whom he edited A Supplement to The Enclave as part of Mosse’s 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize winning exhibition in London. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Oslo, Norway

It's been a while in the making, but finally my next book 'Oslo, Norway' is due for release next month. In celebratory anticipation and to help cover the costs toward remaining production processes, BDP are offering 100 signed copies for pre-sale over the next three weeks, with free shipping. It's a curious little book, three years of toil and inspiration have been condensed into its merry words and obtuse declarations and now I'm really looking forward to it finding a reading audience. Your support means everything.

/This is not a crowd funding campaign/

More info

Please email me for a Media Kit/Review copy

Oslo, Norway: Four Blips

Commercial Broadcasts:

Blip # 4: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, 05.08.2014
Blip # 3: Extrapool, Nijmegan, 16.03.2014
Blip # 2: Team Titanic, Berlin 29.-30.11.2013
Blip # 1: Galerie Plan B, Berlin 28-30.08.2013

Presentation of the collaboration between Natalie Czech and author John Holten - OPEN STUDIOS | Saturday, Septembre 6, 2014, 5 pm until midnight Villa Romana

In Lieu of an Editorial: Newspapers, the Infra-Ordinary & The Enclave

I’m a novelist whose pastime is art, which as distractions go, and novelists can be extreme aficionados of distraction, threatens often to overrun my writing time completely to the point where often I feel I should just call myself an artist and be done with it. When I was writing my first novel I distracted myself by making books with other people: I became an editor and co-started with Line Madsen Simenstad, a Norwegian journalist, Broken Dimanche Press, a self-avowed avant-garde platform that would publish literary books by artists and visual books by writers. We would be political – a tongue in cheek social democratic stance prevailed – and be European wide in outlook. We called the endeavour after Yves Klein and his one day newspaper – Dimanche – that appeared on newsstands throughout Paris on Sunday 27 November 1960, a beautiful constellation of conceptual and performance art intervention and design, all wrapped up in the form of the humble throwaway newspaper. Our plan was to make newspapers and celebrate the Everyday through ludic, artistic and academic interventions in this most commonplace of publications.

Dimanche, Yves Klein, newspaper cover. 

Source: Wikipedia

BDP started with a journal The Kakofonie, but that quickly started to take different forms (a PDF download, a poster, a video selection, a bookmark etc) but never a newspaper. Next came our first book: an anthology You Are Here. We found kindred spirits in the designers FUK. We won the Charlemagne Prize. We made many books with some great artists and writers. Exhibitions. Projects. Tours. Readings. But five years later and we had yet to make a newspaper.

*

In September 2012 I was in Milan putting on an exhibition of LGB art derived from that novel I finally managed to finish in between distractions, The Readymades, when I got a phone call from Richard Mosse. He was in Denver, I think he said, just off a plane and had been reading my novel when the idea came to him that maybe I could travel with him to the Congo when he was making The Enclave. I could try and do something similar to The Readymades – use found material, witness testimonies to war crimes, art historical intrigue and gossip – to compliment the fictive landscape as portrayed in his Infra series. I could help him make his catalogue, his book, something beyond the pale. I said yes, sure thing. Three weeks later I was with him carting beer coolers full of expired infrared film through airports and up and down mountains. We arrived into Goma sometime passed midnight, the streets eerily deserted; even to me who was there for the first time, it was clear that the town was under curfew, in lockdown because of recent grenade attacks and the proximity of the rebel group the M23’s enclave. There was a UN battalion in heavy armoured vehicles. Gun towers along every fence. The roads where barely what you could call roads, made mountainous from the lava from the Nyiragongo volcano, glowing red in the background. The place suffered a kind of doom laden inevitability that kept me from asking myself what I was doing there and now two years later, thinking about this first entry into Congo exhausted from 15 hours of travel, I’m left thinking how funny the places are to which the creation of books can bring you.

*

I don’t really know why I’m drawn to this unit we can call the day, the Everyday, and which the newspaper is the representative form. The newspaper is a durational publication and yet it has a stake in history, its details make up the small details that become building blocks to historiography. Our lives are made up of the day and everyday routines are what ground us to this earth and yet they slip away, get lost so easily: what must it take for you to remember this day in ten year’s time? Borges’ unfortunate Funes, a character I think of often, has a memory of a recall scale 1:1: he takes a whole day just to pass over the memory of one day. A heavy burden and yet so much art and literature chase exactly this burden, to remember, to recall, to dwell and resurrect from the tides of amnesia crashing against the defenseless shores of anamnesis. In The Readymades I invented an art collective, a roaming group of artists called The LGB Group – who have adopted their own reality and have embraced the world with a modicum of success – and their interest, what they strove to exalt in their art was this thing, unit, aspect of life, that they called the Everyday.

Richard Mosse climbs a mountain on the Rwandan-Congolese border, 

October 2012. Photograph: John Holten

In A Supplement to The Enclave it becomes fascinating to read the conversations between Mosse and his collaborators, even to me who knows all three well and was there for much of the recording and events discussed. One fascinating part of these conversations is how one sequence of The Enclave toward the end is referred to in both conversations, indeed Ben Frost says it may be his favourite at one point, while Mosse states that it could be ‘the crux of the piece’. It’s a complicated scene of disjunction, the soundtrack is made up of a loud hammering and arguing voices, a fast rhythm grows: it seems it’s made up of the very disparate elements that make up the chaotic thing that is life. When I was there we developed the idea of luring the viewer into the enclave with long panning shots that would lead the spectator into new spaces. And what does the viewer find when they enter this space? During their first two trips together in the Congo, Mosse and Tweeten had developed a method in which they worked with the present participle verbs of the world of eastern Congo that they encountered, and in so doing they hoped to capture a diurnal impression – such a word seems strangely inadequate – of this land and its people suffering an on-going, shifting war and who are almost incapacitated by a western infrastructure of well meaning NGOs and the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission. To shelter, to move, to give birth, to die, to bury, to eat.

Mosse: A very complicated scene.

Tweeten: To me, I love that scene, because it’s

the most chaotic.

Mosse: It’s a complete disjunction with the

previous scene.

Tweeten: I love it because it’s the real version.

There are these different versions of violence

throughout the piece: there’s the

simulation of violence, there’s the sound

of violence, there’s the visual aftermath

of violence, but then there’s also this moment of 

violence which is the lives these people 

(the refugees and IDPs) are forced

to live which means having to move all

the time to escape war. Which is being

born into these conditions. Which is eating

food on the go, lacking resources and

access to education. these sort of things

which go into making a violent sort of existence,

violent in terms of the everyday

struggle to survive. And to me the chaos

of that whole scene – there are all these

things going on from daily life, birth,

death, eating food – perhaps it’s cliché

but at the same time I think it’s really interesting

because it’s so disjointed.

It’s very hard to capture a place, any place whether it’s familiar territory or another continent, this is the challenge laid down by realism. There are layers, many layers to be peeled back, starting with oneself and your own blinkers that you may not even be aware exist. Georges Perec was aware of this when he tried to explore himself and his surroundings by examining what he called the infra-ordinary: literature doesn’t need to worry about the grand themes of a Hegelian geist moving ineluctably toward its own concrete manifestation, played out in characters and environments woefully predetermined. Rather the ordinary give and take of the everyday holds worlds entire and reading Perec you realise this. Just as in Joyce, who set an entire episode of Ulysses in an newspaper office and whose modern day Ulysses is a newspaper adman, we find that the unit of the day is chosen as the form to fit the universal into, made up of all those tidbits of throwaway life. I spent a lot of time with Mosse wondering what the literary equivalent could be to his infrared photographs. One possible suggestion could be Perec’s infra-ordinary, all that is opposite to the extraordinary. One night after many Tembo beers I started to discuss this with Mosse out on a mosquito plagued terrace on the shores of lake Goma. Mosse uses beauty and reaches toward the sublime, yet The Enclave is composed pretty much of everyday stuff, it may not be his everyday or even his everyday when in the Congo, but having been there with him, running behind Tweeten as he entered into these spaces with the Steadicam, I can attest that it’s run of the mill stuff, even the shocking scenarios, or those that come out in the art gallery as extraordinary; even soldiers and their maneuvers, strutting with guns is normalised (sadly a lot of men join the army or rebel groups just to gain a gun and what that offers them), and even, sadly for that matter, invading a town (around six weeks after my wearied midnight arrival into Goma, the M23 invaded the town which Mosse captured in film). It’s not staged, or even extraordinary, it’s the opposite: terribly mundane, a murderous mundanity in some cases, and Mosse captured it with his tools of choice, an infra red film that sought to look below surfaces, of the visible spectrum of light and the surface of our own expectations of what the journalistic everyday should be.

You could say one goes to the Congo to fail, in a way, which sounds like an indictment, but I’m not talking about the honourable intentions of charity workers, peacekeepers, journalists (and one thing I noticed very quickly was a strange form of possessiveness over Congo and its troubles, more than just a concerted interest). The non-Congolese there all had an opinion and were very proud of the place, in a kind of displaced, paternalistic way which was somehow unsettling and which comes up often in people who have spent time there when responding to Mosse’s work. I failed in one aspect of what I went to the Congo to do, but I also think I will return to finish that aspect of writing a fiction borne out of the place. Like Tweeten talks about how he had to return, twice, thrice, in order to find a working method that was in tune to how the place works and what it means to go there and make work in it.

What then of editing a newspaper out of Mosse’s work set in the Congo? It feels, having travelled there with him and Ben and Trevor, working with his fixers and drivers, negotiating with the rebels captured in his film, making some very good friends as well as battling with the all that the place propositioned, this form matches the dream I’ve cosseted since I started to work with artists. Working with Mosse, Tweeten and Frost has been a truly unique experience, a game changing experience in the creation of an artwork. After five years and many books and exhibitions, as well as a trip to the Congo, I’m very happy that I finally made what I hope is the first of many newspapers.

A Supplement to The Enclave by Richard Mosse. Photograph: FUK Graphic Design