Séance de lecture

From 2011 until 2016, Dominique Hurth investigated the physical manifestation and the performativity of a book. Looking subjectively at the never-realised project of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre (The Book), séance de lecture explores the relationship between text and word, speech and act, the materiality of writing and reading, as well as the expansion of pages once manipulated, re-read and spoken anew. It operates as a partial reconstruction of Mallarmé’s project, based on Hurth’s thorough research of his manuscript. Séance de lecture consists of a performance in an architectural setting and a large printed sheet that envelops four instances of printed matter in a limited edition of 10, each folder investigating a specific printed materiality (silkscreen, offset, riso and digital printing).

Loosely assembling the voices, materials and presences around this project, together with documentation material of exhibitions and performances, a book in an edition of 250 unfolds throughout 224 pages along some parts of the research, material experiments, earlier physical manifestations, documentation of past exhibitions and séances. It also includes earlier contributions by Jack Fisher, Dave Tompkins, Vasilis Marmatakis and Rachel Valinsky’s commissioned text from 2016, as well as some of Hurth’s own writings and script of the performance. 

Printed in offset, it comes with a numbered insert printed in Riso.

This work has been generously supported by FNAGP (Paris).