Haunted Bookshelves

2017-on going/ choreographies of memorizing / built on Bookshelf Research

Our practice of reading in the margins and between the lines while exhuming fragile omissions considers text fragments as circulating through and with participants and encounters. Haunted Bookshelves speaks to the missing pieces from our bookshelves. When something is missing though, it does not mean it is not (t)here.

We rather refer to what Avery Gordon writes in Ghostly Matters, as:

Haunting as a way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over (slavery, for instance), or when the oppressive nature is denied (as in free labour or national security). (..) Indeed it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble.

Avery Gordon, 2008:xvi-xvii

For these sessions, we ask participants to bring a quote for memorizing together.

2018 / 29 September / Haunted Bookshelves / Read-in at Eu Zên / performance and session at Media City Biennale Seoul / Display Distribute (Hong Kong) / Kunci (Yogyakarta)

2018 / 7 January/ Haunted Bookshelves/ Read-in at Finissage House of Wisdom: Collectively (Re)shaping the Archive / session at Framer Framed / Collective Çukurcuma / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.

2017 / 9 October/ Haunted Bookshelves/ Read-in at School of Improper Education (Sekolah Salah Didik) / session at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta