Irati Irulegi: Copy paste

20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS  - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.

Copy paste is part of a set of attempts of unlearning and speculating on museums. This time, it is a presentation of a fanzine that was created in conversation with artist and friend Masha Perskaya. A fanzine that departs from one particular collection, that became many.

Antonia Majaca, Anselm Franke, Laura Harris and Hypatia Vourloumis responded to the question:

What collects?

Report by Ayesha Hameed:

This presentation takes the form of a fanzine created with Masha Perskaya. The pages are laid out on several tables to be assembled by the audience. There are images on navigation and from graphic novels and the Victorian era; there are underwater creatures and tails growing out of human pelvises. Some of the audio appears among the annotated texts that include a list of non-intuitive gestures like combing hair. In kind with the images, the texts are a collage: objects are repeated, giving a sense of language unravelling, of montage. During the presentation a pre-recorded discussion is heard on speakers detailing the different ways in which the audience can assemble the zine. Objects and phrases are repeated in various permutations. The loose conversation spirals in a structured way delivering instructions that are about many things. The audio repeats and loops next to the sound of the audience and rustling of paper in a room in flux. 

Hypatia Vourloumis said she would love to see what everyone had done with their zines, to see different collections. This presentation provided a way to think of collections in other contexts as well, she said, those built from the bottom up. ‘José Munoz’ work, Ephemera as Evidence, describes an anti-rigour in what we collect and give value to,’ she said, and wondered whether the images were from one collection. ‘There is one page that describes the origin of the sources, it would be interesting to know more.’

Laura Harris said the presentation allowed the audience to become part of the process, and made her aware of her own desire to collect all the pages. ‘There was a collaborative quality to how people did them together,’ she said. 

Antonia Majaca’s thought that the audio might be discussing the daughters of Knossos got her questioning myths: ‘In the ancient Greek myth, who chooses the young men and women sent to labyrinths? How is this selection made? By beauty?’ It also evoked for her Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which made her wonder what was blown up here and what fragments were expanded.

Anselm Franke said the comics related anarchist cities to repressed memory. From this he asked: ‘How did the project fail and how then to imagine self beyond the failure? What are the cuttings doing? What if the plasticized image was the first one? In which case what other images would support that reading? In other words, what hallucinatory reading can you produce in this reading?’ For Franke, the presentation raised the idea of an undisciplined museum or one that moves away from disciplines.