Appropriated Mishap

Appropriated Mishap is a 13-minute Animated collage with quotations from La Poubelle Agréée by (1975) Italo Calvino.

'La Poubelle Agréée' (1974-76), is reprinted in 'This Mess is a Place' (ed. Mendelson, 2013), and is Calvino’s typically elegant essay on the complexities of waste management from his Paris home and into the world beyond. In this animation, Calvino’s text is mis-used as a vehicle for its own destruction. The piece was made in response to having 750 misprints to destroy after having included Calvino’s essay in an edited book.

Several months after publication, I returned to the appropriateness of this waste product from Calvino’s work and began to consider ways I could get rid of the pages. Proposing ways in which the text could be expelled, transported and afforded new status as a container for food or drink (‘food for… reading’) towards its own ingestion, I set up various possibilities for its demise. Using stop-frame animation, collage and lingering photographic stills of collaged domestic spaces, I played with regurgitated versions of the text in both form and content. The ‘character’ I charged with the task of disposing of La Poubelle Agréée is a surrogate for myself: An animalistic (and self-reproducing) counterpart, made of my own hair.

There are two versions of this animation (the first performed at Artsadmin in Feb 2014; the second at Griffin Gallery in Jan 2018). The first includes a reading of clunky extracts from a banal out-of-print guide to waste management, also from the ‘seventies. The second includes a semi-fictitious lecture on waste and hoards.

• https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/3466
• http://griffingallery.co.uk/events/the-p...