Session three, “The Book to Come” Reading Group: “Lumpen”, proposed by Discoteca Flaming Star

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Discoteca Flaming Star have been making banners since the year 2001. These are large textile works inscribed with broken, open emblems. The banner texts grow out of a perpetual dialogue with living and deceased artists and extend their fabric through spaces which they interrupt and soften at the same time. In Session 3 of The Book to Come, we would like to think and work around the possibility/question of a banner-book inspired by Marcel Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête and Un voyage en Mer du Nord, and by the way we find them today. Starting with the presence/presentation of his books, and with how the books mingle with images we have of his work, we ponder the difficulty and ease of making a book. We would like to get closer to the textile origin of the materials that books are made of: the paper, once textile, the interweaving of texts as they grow in our computer programs… to emerge or intermingle again on digital networks. 

Discoteca Flaming Star is an interdisciplinary artistic and collaborative performance project originated in 1998 by Cristina Gómez Barrio (1973) and Wolfgang Mayer (1967). Discoteca Flaming Star aims to be a mental space that all kinds of artists can enter to experiment with different paths for contemporary aesthetic praxis, searching for its limits and avoiding processes of formalization. The work has been shown at numerous venues including Artists Space, Whitney Museum and The Kitchen in NYC; MUMOK, Vienna; HKW, n.b.k., Basso and KW in Berlin; Ojo Atómico and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid; WHW, Zagreb; Tate Modern, London; De Appel and Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam.

The project The Book to Come is developed as part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum, Leuven), and Tate Modern (London): www.corpus-network.org.

Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.