Deborah Schamoni

In a pull-quote V Vale, of San Fransisco’s famed RE-search publishing house, dragged out from one of the many interviews he’d conducted with J. G. Ballard, it says in the first line under THE ARTS, WRITING section:

We’re just drowning under manufactured fiction, which satisfies our Need For Fiction, you scarcely need to go and read a novel.
[Observer 2002]

In considering how to behave/approach the situation, I very readily chose to recede into the realm of Semantics. There are a lot of ‘things’ in the world, and adding too much to them seemed absurd at this moment. Conversely though, Semantics was the trap which I/we were drowning in. The problem is great, and an old one perhaps.

Hence, to manufacture a ‘fiction’ seemed a plausible way to begin to unpack some of the palpable intensities tripping me up on a daily basis.

“A King walks into a bar...”

A ‘staged’ fiction, albeit driven by a whole series of procedures, or perhaps more precisely, rituals, performed by players performing not only themselves, but the shadows of themselves.

Last year we invented the diode of The Electrician & The Magician, figures whose expertises might assist us in burrowing into problems associated with the Image & Word.

Enter The Librarian... her shadow not far behind.

... in this shadow of a Shadow... chances are slim, this Game’s on Tilt.

Text: Midway Contemporary Art
Photos: Rik Sferra