Re-distributed Archive Tour

Re-distributed Archive Tour, a project commissioned by Anna Colin and Remco di Blaaj as part of 10 x 10 exhibition, coinciding with the European Culture Congress in Wroclaw, 7-11 Sept, 2011

The curators proposed an alternative historical tour led by Mateusz Kornacki, a local guide. A series of talks, delivered by art historian Lynda Morris and writer/photographer Ariella Azoulay, punctuated his narrative as he led the public through sites of contested and often repressed histories of the city.

My contribution offers a critical reading of the mechanisms of distribution related to cultural events, bringing together traditional print and contemporary social media. A set of posters showing a self-portrait of Julia Pirotte, an official photographer of the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, was distributed by flyposting along the tour’s route. The design of the poster (by Luke Gould) references the colours used in a series of commemorative postage stamps released during the Recovered Territories Exhibition, which also took place in 1948. While postcards and printed matter were part of the official publicity machine then, my project employs twitter as a form of sharing and documenting.

Using a mobile phone, I took photos during the tour and simultaneously posted twitpics, those who followed screened_out on twitter were able to assemble a parallel history of the event in real time. The live tweets were interspersed with archival postcards and photographs originating from the 1948 Exhibition and Congress.