SPEECH AND WHAT ARCHIVE?

POSTERS ON MAISON FLOTTANTE, CNEAI

CHATOU, FRANCE

We propose an exhibition on the Cneai boat where the SWA? workshops were held, using a standard format for all works. Each SWA? workshop participant will be invited to make a poster on the same size paper that was used to generate notes and charts during the workshop. The blue tape used by ACW to hang these charts will be used to hang the posters.

The defined format of a poster with sprawling and divergent content generated by participants—this contains a similar logic to the workshop itself, where we were gathered in a shared environment while developing ideas, thoughts, conversations, interests and projects that were not necessarily unified. Space for connections, ruptures and departures.

The posters are an opportunity to further extend on the ideas of ‘speech’ and ‘the archive’. As during the workshop, these ideas remain open and contingent on however people want to consider them and what other points of reference they may want to draw into this consideration.

It is important that this poster project does not present a summation of the workshop or try to represent any conclusions to what transpired. It is a point of departure, a continuation of the conversation in a different mode, another way to develop ideas around ‘speech’ and ‘the archive’. Significantly, the poster project provides a shared platform on which participants who were not present in the workshop can partake in a collective conversation about the subject.

We will also work on creating a SWA? reader to be available as a print-on-demand PDF, a compilation of various material that feeds into our collective and individual projects. The reader will be a more focused document that identifies useful research and other relevant projects to do with ‘speech’ and ‘the archive’. This material may include sourced texts, texts written by participants, suggested reading from the SWA? blog, images, documents, artworks, etc. Please send us any material you wish to be included in the reader. We will print some copies of this reader and place them on chairs on the boat so they are available for the audience to read.

Posters may be printed from a digital file or hand made.

With the assistance of A Constructed World we will seek the support of Cneai in allowing us to use the boat as an exhibition space. We hope to realise the project by November 2009.