Joëlle de La Casinière: Absolument nécessaire
6 April–4 June 2011

The Reading Room is a new series of projects at International Project Space running alongside the main exhibitions programme. Departing from the traditional form of a gallery bookshop, The Reading Room presents both artist and curatorial projects which interrogate the notion of ‘publishing’ and ‘publicness’, investigating the ways in which knowledge is produced and made public today through experimental forms of writing and distribution.

Absolument nécessaire was Casinière’s first book, published in 1973 by Les Editions de Minuit in Paris. It is a unique graphic manuscript made during and after a period of travelling in South America. Moving fluidly between poetry texts and image Absolument nécessaire is at once travel diary, sketchbook, script and graphic novel; Deleuze and Guattari championed it in A Thousand Plateaus, calling it a ‘truly nomadic book’. It is accompanied by La première partie du roi Henri IV de double V Shakespeare: une analogie, a filmic extension of the book shot around a group of artists attempting to stage Shakespeare’s Henry IV using the inhabitants of a small town in Columbia as actors. Marrying image, sound and text, the film, like the book, opens up a space in which no one element of information is given priority.

For The Reading Room Casinière has revisited the manuscript to create an installation of the pages across a large-scale cork-board wall in a manner that re-articulates the fluid composition of the original book.

To see a digital copy of Absolument nécessaire please visit Casinière's website HERE