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DIRTY LITERATURE
Francesco Pedraglio and Tom McCarthy
National Portrait Gallery, London
Thursday 16 June 2011, 7 PM
Francesco Pedraglio, A few stories in the shape of abstract objects
Pedraglio's performance is based on suppositions and rumours, a narration that uses invisibility and abstraction as red threads to make sense of a number of seemingly
chaotic clues. Turning to the help of an Egyptian man and his French alter-ego, a rock, an arrow, a hole in the ground and a stomach filled with earth, Pedraglio will
attempt to demonstrate the existence of non-experiential memories and their link with the production of abstract objects.
Tom McCarthy,C
C is flooded with signals. The novel follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who - as his name suggests - surges into the electric modernity of
the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. Affiliated with the abstract language of technical codes and networks,
C brings
into play questions of systems of transfer and the abstraction of mediated communication. Reading and reflecting on passages of
C, McCarthy will expand on the
absence and loss of narrative coherence in the three-way relationship between language, technology and subjectivity.
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About the artists
Francesco Pedraglio is co-founder of the art space FormContent and editor of the fanzine
The Mock and other superstitions. He has published short stories in magazines
and journals and is currently working on
The Object Lessons, a novel on the work of Nina Beier and Marie Lund. He has curated exhibitions in the UK and internationally,
including
The Responsive Subject (Mu.Zee, Ostend, 2011),
Session_15 (BolteLang, Zurich, 2010),
The Plurality of One (MONITOR, Rome, 2009),
Through Body and Text
(La Galerie, Paris, 2009) and
The Young People... (GAM, Turin, 2009). He is guest-editor of the Book Works project,'The Time Machine'.
Tom McCarthy is a writer whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Besides the novels
Remainder, Men in Space and
C, he has also written the
non-fiction book
Tintin and the Secret of Literature, a study of the work of Hergé. McCarthy is the co-founder of the International Necronautical Society (INS),
a 'semi-fictitious organisation' that combines literature, art and philosophy. The INS was founded in 1999 and has since led to publications, installations and
exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain and the ICA in London to Moderna Museet in Stockholm and The Drawing Center in New York.
Tom regularly writes on literature and art for publications including
The New York Times, The London Review of Books and
Artforum.
Image credit: Francesco Pedraglio,
Hanging Rock, 2011
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