Guerrilla Archiving comes to Bank Street
As Artist in Residence invited to work with Bank Street Arts International Book Collection I am holed up in Studio A7 sat amid a sea of some 200+ artist books.
The task: to exploit this unique archive as a site for artistic production approaching the book collection tangentially to generate an art work or series of responses.
This archive of books is treated as site, material, and process; to be approached through research, experimentation, and play. I am manipulating the archive through the process of Guerrilla Archiving which produces new methods of archiving, subverting traditional archival organising principles. The veracity of notional authority ascribed to archives – such as through their existing narratives- is challenged. This is an on-going, re-visionary, reflexive process.
An Initial fortnight was spent simply processing each book, spending time with the books as they came to hand, one at a time. Through the slow application of this procedure, eventually a way was found through the material.
Inevitably maybe, the outcome will be an artist’s book…but it will be a book which uniquely binds and combines every single book in the current collection.
