Date 2009 Height (cm) 14 Length (cm) 9 Depth (cm) 1,5 Weight (g) 100 Materials and Techniques marker and ink on paper. Subject/Description This is a project I did specifically for lettera27, but the characters that I configure have been part of my work for some years. In Unfolding Nota, the mice use a meta-linguistic terminology, generated by language, yet with the purpose of analyzing language and signification, breaking down language into small particles and linking them into a new linguistic code in a rather nonsensical way. Who is speaking and who is listening also remains obscure. There is no particular subjective view trying to come through and ‘make sense’, but a collective oral experience: a speech ritual rather than a delivered message, a stream of consciousness rather than a thesis. In this situation, only through orality can words be lived, but their life is independent of the speaker. Just like only through orality words can be understood as you learn how to read. I think maybe the mice want to become language, and at the same time they empty it of its functions and thus its traditional meaning. The text loses its subjectivity, becomes decentralized, democratized. Maybe they want to unfold the code by becoming the code, but in doing that they are caught in the paradox of the code itself, by becoming in the viewers’ experience my new artistic code. This makes me think of our continuous attempts of de-codification and the paradox that lies therein, partly because subjectivity is something we are never able to perforate. In the context of lettera27, I also think of the process of unfolding the code in relation to learning how to read or write, and to the partly absurd dimension that this experience holds within itself. Finally, the other language – the one normally connected with the visual figures of the cartoon-like mice: ‘wheee’, ‘arrrg’, ‘uh?’ – is the most resistant and the one to keep its mystery.
Archival Fund AtWork Archive number XIII_216 Exhibitions AtWork, Institut Francais de Dakar, May 2012
Personal data Helsingborg, 1977. Artist.