AF Munich

We kept trying to find ways to make the process of exhibiting fruitful for us. We wanted something to happen through it. Just re-presenting or re-sharing the books was boring and not enough. We wanted to find ways to not keep rehashing the same conversations over and over so we decided to catalog the collection in different ways each time we displayed it.

For Munich, we categorised the books according to the modes in which they were distributed. It was clear that the categorisation did impact the questions the visitors formulated to the collection. It also made clear that it was hard for us to do this in a way that allowed us to share the collection in an additive way. We didn’t find a way to enable the collection to accumulate the knowledge that emerged at every exhibition and encounter and to allow people to access it so they could catch up with us. We were still the bodies that needed to mediate the collection and that meant we were permanently stuck in the shallow aspects of the arguments. To me, we were slowly becoming the maintainers of the collection and I wasn’t comfortable with that role.

Annotated by AF