The course uses the trope of the ‘Scribe’ to investigate, through rigorous documentation, the

landscape of the everyday, the politics of the personal, our interdependencies, our patterns of

consumption, etc., in order to aestheticise and through the aesthetic, review our worlds. The scribe

is an archetype who is able to record ceaselessly and tirelessly to archive the seemingly mundane

business of living. The scribe here sees value in the image, in the poem, in the account and the

dialogue and the dream. The “arcades” of Paris that Benjamin uses in his book, here become a

metaphor for the cluttered, crowded and busy forms of our living, spatially without an inside and an

outside, fractal, insoluble, tangled and fantastic, like a labyrinth.

The stress on the “unfinished” suggests that the work is capable of remaining suspended in

possibilities. There is a certain pleasure in contemplation at a juncture in a story and a satisfaction in

things remaining unresolved and unsettled. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Borges, which also

invokes the labyrinth, speaks of multiple possible timelines and futures that play out when multiple

routes are explored. The ‘manuscript’ allows you to enter and loiter and leave at your will and allows

for a subjective reading, which is the charge of the everyday here.

Notes on the everyday:

Here, the everyday is not simply that in our lives which presents itself and remains readily available

for scrutiny, nor is it the dominant account of social lives as presented by a macro narrative telling of

the everyday. Rather, it is what is hidden, what is particular, our personal forms of pleasure and

creativity, and the ambivalence of our forms of living - the troublesome and the unruly along with

the obedient and the stable. The reclamation of this everyday through an archival practice is about

identifying our forms of resistance, recognising the practices of our quotidian lives that go against

the grain of prevalent conformism, and is also about bringing to the foreground, through a stress on

dreams and experience, the unreal, the mythical and the illusory that together comprise the

everyday. As suggested by Freud, the everyday is “both real and unreal, both actuality and the

disguise of actuality”

In the act of recording the everyday obsessively, the book becomes the realm for analyses that are

about the interpretations of dreams, and the individual and collective subconscious.

The ‘book’ that the course intends to produce here is a collection of documents, notes and

reflections, drawings (especially drawings!) and remnants of the paraphernalia of living that become

a research diary, a sketchbook, or an activity log. It is a garden that allows overgrowth and

wilderness, where certain pages are detailed and preserved, while others are incomplete, taper off,

punctuated by bursts of intense, frenetic activity that again give way to short, concise

contemplations. The forms of the book are several, in some cases it could be an elaborate system of

a bookmarks bar with branching and splitting and several subdivisions in the folders, a digital trove

of annotations and references, a virtual “Arcades Project” if need be.

The driving principle of the work, and the structure of the work, is a continuous movement within

the form of the montage, which plays with distances, overlaps and intersections and transitions,

which individually and through their transactions speak of affinities and fully formed and

intermediate relations where the fragments then begin to substitute language. The montage

functions as a device that I feel, as Benjamin says, could “find the lost time embedded in the space of

things”.

To elaborate further on the idea of the “loss of language”, the collected and built and scripted and

observed and drawn fragments, embody an infinite list (as suggested by Umberto Eco, The Infinity of

Lists). The boundaries of this list are unknown and its very definition is unclear, there is no

established hierarchical order to the appearance and sequence of the fragments. They serve to

remind us of, or to build for us, a specific image of the world at a particular moment through their

place in the collection but they do not adhere to the rules or the forms of writing or the “practical

list”, where the fragments would be contained and corroborated with the real object. Therefore,

they constitute a “poetic list” which is an imprecise, subjective exercise in world building.

The course will use the four weeks to develop the individual practice of the scribe, it will have

frequent lectures on visual culture and establishing systems of referencing within visual culture but

will dive into the methods of collection, organisation and curation of data and ephemera to build the

manuscripts. Methods here include, but are not limited to, transcriptions of conversations and

soliloquies, observation drawings, paper trails and evidences of interactions, among others. The

‘books’ could develop from themes and patterns that the records throw up, explore a particular

method of representation or simply be bodies of disarranged likenesses of the inside and outside

worlds and their blurs.