FOSSIL: Architecture in Motion

"FOSSIL. Architecture in Motion" is a film installation, comprised of a film projection and a large format 'scrapbook' containing approximately 800 images in complex fold-out double-page spreads.

The scrapbook was made for the show at The British School at Rome Sainsbury Gallery, Rome (31 January - 9 February 2024). It was presented alongside the projection of our 16mm film, FOSSIL [14 minutes, black and white with colourised sequences].

Instagram post showing the FOSSIL scrapbook being unfolded:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2wsEknokpr/

The exhibition at the BSR was the second instalment of the larger film and curatorial project ‘FOSSIL’, originally commissioned and funded by The Royal Academy of Art, London, as part of the 250th anniversary celebrations of the RA Schools [exhibited at The Royal Academy Schools Weston Studios, September – November 2019].

The 16mm film depicted the demounting of the 18th-century architectural plaster casts previously hidden behind the walls of the RA Schools studios. Alongside the 16mm film, the Royal Academy installation included 6 large late Eighteenth century plaster casts of architectural details selected by the artists from the RA collection [the selection of casts, all of which were made in Rome in the 1790s, was made in collaboration with Helen Valentine, Curator of the RA collection]. The RA exhibition was also accompanied by a fold out pamphlet that included a conversation between the artists and Helen Valentine addressing why the RA has a collection of plaster casts, where the casts came from, and the role of drawing the casts in the education of architects.

The FOSSIL project has also been presented in artists’ talks accompanying the screening of the film at:

Touched. Gripped. Held. Recent 16mm films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone.
Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan (November 2022). Q&A with Koyo Yamashita, Director, Image Forum.

Slowly, and by hand— a programme of films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone. The Kaleide Theatre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, (April 2024). Organised by the Artists Film Workshop, Melbourne.

The handmade scrapbook measures 30cm x 50cm, but when the folded pages are fully opened it expands in concertina fashion to measure 30cm x 3m 50cm.

The blank book was made at Wyvern Bindery, Hoxton, to a design by the artists and consists of 8 fold out spreads. When exhibited the scrapbook is free to be opened and closed by the audience.

The scrapbook contains over 800 ‘tipped in’ images, printed, cut out, and pasted in by the artists. Most of the images – collected during 3 week-long visits to the BSR archive, numerous visits to Sir John Soane’s Museum, The Warburg Institute, and online - depict two ancient Roman ruins, The Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Round Temple on the Tiber (plaster casts from these two ruins feature in the 16mm film exhibited at the RA).

The images on these fold-out spreads include early guidebook illustrations, fold-out tourist maps, postcards, prints, master drawings and paintings, micro mosaic jewellery, cork and marble models, photographs, and fashion accessories. The historical span of the images ranges from a drawing by Sabastiano Serlio made in 1540 to a covid mask produced in 2020.

For this exhibition of the FOSSIL project, our interest focussed on architecture in motion and the circulation of images of the Roman Forum on tourist souvenirs and in print culture.

Our intention was to make an archive of the images of The Temple of Castor and Pollux and The Round Temple by the Tiber as they recurred across time – from an early master drawing to a contemporary handbag.

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was an important reference here, particularly in the way his collection uncovers the repetition of imagery from Antiquity to the newspaper clipping.

The research questions then addressed display and how to devise a mode of presentation that would allow us to show the entire collection of 800 images in a form that was portable and could be carried to Rome as aircraft hand luggage.
This led to research on the folded page in architectural books and the tradition of folded maps in tourist guides.
Working with The Wyvern Bindery, we then focussed our research on the issues of paper engineering, the fold, and the paper hinge.

The work exists in the field of:

1. Artists’ and writers’ scrapbooks, in which visual research and ephemera is gathered (examples being the scrapbooks of Agnes Varda, Cecil Beaton, William Burroughs & Brion Gysin, Isa Genzken).

2. Artists’ collections of images drawn from popular print culture, such as the postcards of rough seas accumulated by Susan Hiller, and the thousands of images of men clipped from magazines that make up Vince Aletti’s devotional collection, The Drawer.

The impetus for an interest in the folded page emerged during the first visit to the BSR, when we handled folded prints in original volumes published by Piranesi, and unfurled the folded maps glued into early tourist guides to Rome. This interest developed through the examination of architectural and landscape volumes by Pugin, Repton, and Blondel and the use of paper flaps that conceal and reveal images - The Anatomy of the Architectural Book at the Canadian Centre for Architecture [2016] was particularly useful here. As was the exhibition of Proust’s paperolls at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2022 - the paperolls being the pasted together notes and bits of paper he inserted in small notebooks to form the 2 metre long folded drafts of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Subsequent research on paper folding led us to propose that sequential, rhythmic unfolding is a technique that allows a portable paper archive to be seen as a totality, whilst also physically engaging an audience with the display.

The combination of sequential unfolding and scrapbooking distinguishes the BSR exhibition from other recent presentations of scrapbooks and printed paper based collections, such as Vince Aletti‘s exhibition of his scrapbook images in The Drawer, White Columns, New York (2024). Aletti’s images were arranged under glass on table tops. Two major exhibitions of historical scrapbooks at Rencontres d'Arles, Espace Van Gogh, (2023) and the ICA, London (2014) also placed scrapbooks under glass in vitrines.

In the making of the work the follow were researched and referred to:

Exhibitions of scrapbooks

Matthieu Orléan. Scrapbooks. Dans l'imaginaire des cinéastes [exhibition catalogue]
Delpire/Rencontres d'Arles, Espace Van Gogh. 2023.

Paperwork: A Brief History of Artists' Scrapbooks, (exhibition catalogue) ICA, London. 2014.

Jean Michel-Wicker Cutting Edge. Artists Scrapbooks (weblog), Brighton University, 2020.

Artists’ paper collections

Susan Hiller Dedicated to the Unknown Artists 1972–6 (300 postcard images of rough seas) exhibited at Tate Britain, 2023-24.

Vince Aletti The Drawer exhibited at White Columns New York, 2024 (also published by Mack Books, 2022).

Philippe Alain Michaud Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion Zone Books 2004.

The paper fold

Gill Partington and Adam Smyth ‘Folds – dog ears – creases – pleats –kinks – pranks – convolutions’ in ‘Folds’ Special Issue of Inscription. The Journal of Material Text. 2023.
Sophia Vyzoviti Folding Architecture. Spatial, Structural and Organisational Diagrams BIS Publishing, 2003.

Andre Tavares The Anatomy of the Architectural Book [exhibition catalogue] Canadian Centre for Architecture/Lars Muller 2016

• https://bsr.ac.uk/fossil-architecture-in...
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