Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) comprises five volumes as an unbound book, of which ‘Writing’ is the last. The vignette above illustrates the multivalency and polyvocality of the project. As curators we brought together many voices through artifacts and accounts within and around the practice of de Blacam and Meagher. Rather than overtly imposing a critical, curatorial reading the arrangement of the material on the page and in the room is a physical and spatial manifestation of this idea. Compressed information is stored (in a depot or collection point) to meet the viewer-reader who encounters the material at various speeds. Initially this is through the physical/proprioceptive encounter with the oratory, the materials (wood, paper), and their superimposition on the existing architecture of the oratory, and subsequently the visitor might takes away copies, which now reside on a shelf as part of a library or collection (another depot) available for a multiple (slower) readings over time.
In of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) the book and exhibition curation are understood as a publication. In the context of Venice, with high visitor numbers, and addressing our concern over spread and distribution (previous exhibition publications for Ireland’s pavilion have limited circulation due to unit cost and print run) predicated that there should be a high print run (9,000 copies). The amassing of so much paper for exhibition determines that the book en mass is of the scale of sculpture. In this holistic framing the book also performs as a sculptural object, read against the (blanked) altars of the oratory. Indeed the visitors’ experience of it is part sculptural, part architectural. They must move –through– the space, in effect –through– the pages of the book, immersed in its material presence. The physicality of the paper becomes legible as a sculptural component in dialogue with the timber of the pallets beneath, and the stone of the floors and alters. The visitor’s proprioception is heightened. The ‘Archive’ (Volumes 1–3) includes the designs of chapels and churches, so the setting in the San Gallo oratory has transtextual resonance, and offers further material context.
The objects we insert into the space – the paper stacks; the oak joinery which forms floors or low tables on which the book is arranged; the Gall chairs which spill out onto the Campo – are material transpositions of encounter with the buildings of de Blacam and Meagher. The order of this arrangement – five volumes organised by typology, the grid structuring these page layouts, the consequent sizing and grid of the oak furniture and its placement in relation to the existing plan of the oratory – is considered as a whole, and the movement and interaction of the visitor in the space and with this material, through their removal of copies of the book is a performance of this transposition.