marginalia (2025)

installation & performance | textual archive, laser engravings on books, live sound
Exhibited at A_Mazing_Machine(s): Wordscapes to Liberate Language @ UBIK, WORM Rotterdam

Writing does something when published. Since the invention of text, it has functioned to flatten out a plurality of worlds from history, performing domination, differentiation and justifying violence. Marginalia takes selected texts in different historical contexts, and transforms them in experimental annotations engraved in canonical books. The resulting visual language communicates semiotics of displacement and a cartography manufactured by hegemonic world views. As a performance, layers of text, speech, and distortion presents a writing machine as sonic warfare.

Performance documentation: Soda
This work was supported by Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD).

Marginalia is a research-based project and work in progress, where the goal remains to collect textual samples that shaped history and territory. Currently, its installation version features five books and a library of laser animations. The live performance builds on them, adding field recordings of historical speeches and the development of sound effects to translate the experimental annotations into audio.

For more in-depth discussion on marginalia, visit the process journal.