A Conversation between David Senior, Julia van Haaften, Etienne Turpin, and Anna-Sophie Springer

The intercalations: paginated exhibition series is an experimental foray exploring the structure of the book as a potential curatorial space. As the reader-as-exhibition viewer moves through the book-as-exhibition, she discovers that the erratic intercalations of the Anthropocene invite new forms of literacy, visuality, inquiry, and speculation that are, in the words of Clarice Lispector, less promiscuous than they are kaleidoscopic.

To celebrate the launch of intercalations 1 and 2, please join us for a conversation between MoMA Librarian David Senior, former NYPL photography curator Julia Van Haaften, and series co-editors Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin about book-exhibitions, libraries, and publishing in the Anthropocene.

David Senior is an author, curator, and Bibliographer at The Museum of Modern Art Library. Anna-Sophie Springer is an independent curator, editor, and co-director of K. Verlag, Berlin. Etienne Turpin is a philosopher and director of anexact office, Jakarta, Indonesia. Julia Van Haaften is an independent curator and author; she was the founding curator of the New York Public Library photography collection. 

About the Books

Fantasies of the Library inaugurates the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. Virtually stacked alongside Anna-Sophie Springer’s feature essay “Melancholies of the Paginated Mind” about unorthodox responses to the institutional ordering principles of book collections, the volume includes an interview with Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive by Hammad Nasar, Head of Research and Programmes at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; a conversation with media theorist Joanna Zylinska about experiments on the intersections of curatorial practice and open source e-books; and a discussion between K’s co-director Charles Stankievech and platform developer Adam Hyde on new approaches to open source publishing in science and academia. The photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines,” presents views of unusual historical libraries next to works by artists such as Kader Attia, Andrew Beccone, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, Andrew Norman Wilson, and others. Available here.

Land & Animal & Nonanimal turns the attention from the built space of cultural repositories to the postnatural landscapes of planet Earth. In his interview about urban soils of the Anthropocene, landscape architect Seth Denizen considers a history of land use practices that is also reflected in artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s photographs of Singapore as a scenario of continuous development. Inspired by a recent visit to the environment of Wendover in the Utah desert, Richard Pell and Lauren Allen of Pittsburgh’s Center for PostNatural History make a case for a postnatural imprint upon the geologic aspects inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene. By encountering “the last snail,” environmental historian and philosopher Thom van Dooren considers the meaning of hope and care in the context of species extinction. And while curator Natasha Ginwala’s paginated series with contributions by Bianca Baldi, Arvo Leo, Axel Staschnoy, and Karthik Pandian & Andros Zins-Browne turns to cosmological and ancestral human-animal scenarios, sound artist and researcher Mitchell Akiyama explores philosophies of consciousness against the background of the phonogram in nineteenth-century simian research. Available here.

The intercalations: paginated exhibition series was conceived and developed by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin for the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. Produced in association with SYNAPSE co-founders Kirsten Einfeldt and Daniela Wolf, the series is co-published and distributed by K. Verlag and HKW with financial support from the Schering Stiftung