Serendipitous Circuit

A project by Léa Lagasse

5 November - 16 December 2012
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Wednesday to Sunday, 12-5 pm

Part of: Expanded Performance

"In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps overwritten spaces in an ephemeral dance."
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980

Serendipitous Circuit, a project initiated by the artist Léa Lagasse, brings together a series of exhibitions of printed matter presented on a library wheel. Léa Lagasse has reconstructed a wheel following the same construction principle first imagined by Agostino Ramelli in the 16th century. The key element to the mechanism of the wheel is a cogged system which maintains numerous shelves at a constant angle while its user rotates the instrument and wanders from one book to the other. As this apparatus intends for its operator to read several books at once, the collision between the writings from different sources triggers digressive thinking, fortuitous combinations, and frictions between the texts.

A selection of artists, curators and writers have been invited to reflect on the type of reading activity allowed by this atypical device. Each of them has selected six titles to be displayed on the wheel shelves, for a week.

At Stroom Den Haag, the audience is invited to consult the publications by operating the wheel, thus generating his own unique narration. In this context, the ever-changing library space induces idiosyncratic readings, first with the guest curators' individual visions but also when the system is activated by its user and starts to generate content on its own. Serendipitous Circuit explores the outcomes of reading as a production of new meanings. It becomes the tool to induce, analyse and utilize the interpretative process at work while one reads, a process led by pleasure, drifts and chance.

05/11 - 13/11/12: Arnold Mosselman
14/11 - 20/11/12: Pedro Gadanho
21/11 - 27/11/12: Anthony Huberman
28/11 - 04/12/12: Will Holder
05/12 - 16/12/12: The Grand Domestic Revolution by Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory

05 Nov '12 - 16 Dec '12
Hogewal 1-9, The Hague