Paper is a body,
born out of water,
with cells of cellulose fibres,
that originate from wood, cotton and recycled paper.
Paper is the daughter of linear production, with sisters identical to one another, made with machines, pressed, dried and cut into standardized shapes,
brought with trucks into offices, institutions and homes to bear text, doodles, and ink on their skin, and then to be granted eternal life in folders – forgotten, but valued, and kept,
or shred, if seen secrets
or burnt,
or thrown into the trash
if the writers were not amazed
with their writing.
Paper is the witness of societal memory,
of contracts and bureaucracies,
of our diaries, love letters, and family photographs.
It is a carrier of projections, reflections and future plans.
Papers are published all the time.
They refer to other than themselves
but to meanings conceived with text
and to printing that presses knowledge onto bodies,
superficially and externally.
Paper, desired for its indexicality,
touched, passed from hand to hand,
now, celebrates itself:
„I HAVE POWER,
I AM STRONG,
I AM BEAUTIFUL AF“*
The Paper published here is hand made and recycled from the 15 pages of poetry that the Italian-Armenian artist Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin had printed out and taped on the studio walls between the 9-19 of January 2023 in Lavanderia a Vapore while working on their performance „Anahit“ (2023).
While remembering its origins and the plurality and fluidity of Anahit, the Armenian goddess of water, the Published Paper bridges to the present, to a more recent project of Ohanesian Nardin, „The Pleasure Body“(2024), performed as a talk at the Dark Matters Winter Festival and activated as a shared time-space during the Spring Rolls Spring Festival with practices and conversations related to pleasure and rest,
to question, heal and enchant the internalised imprints of systematic oppression on bodies, relationships and communities.
With a focus on the conditioning of the iliopsoas muscle within a culture of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy,
the Pleasure Body offers a critical, perceptual and somatic investigation of pleasure, rest and healing to an overstimulated, short and tense hip flexor, influenced by the voluntary and involuntary flight or fight response, impacting not only physical health but also the emotional well-being of the body.
Cultural moulding is a practice of printing – marking and signing bodies
according to a logic that stands for an adoption of knowledge from external sources as opposed to distilling it from experience.
Pivoting from the practices of Ohanesian Nardin, the Published Paper seeks to invert this mechanism of knowledge production.
It celebrates paper,
gives it space and
allows it to take up space
by simply publishing it’s naked body.
It encourages you to approach it with awe and to ask:
What emerges from within?
What is moving in the body,
oozing,
bubbling up from below?
The Paper that you witness here has been recycled:
torn, blended and washed in water,
with its structural architecture re-organized
but still embodying traces of the imprints it once bore.
It calls to observe and wonder
together with Pleasure Body:
What are the ways in which the body internalises forms of systemic oppression?
How do these forms translate into ways of being in the body?
From this perspective, what do we mean when we speak of care?
What would our lives, societies, and the world be like if they were based on a matrix of pleasure instead of profit?
Kadri Sirel
*from the yerbamala collective: BURNITALLDOWN: AN ANTIFASCIST SPELLBOOK