07 / for verysmallkitchen

– one
– pleasingly
– didn’ts
– strings
– mindless
– webps
– two weeks
– <br>
– übrý
– Geschenke
– dave david davidson
– flanger
– techno
– murmur
– htsm
– hbc
– plainblack
– b sp
– hangovercity
– little myth
– a million shouldhaves a day
– plenty of time
– whitechapel
– five-o’clock-freak-out
– rainy
– TESCO (extra)
– an X from me
– that was nice
– (out)
– holding pencil, ready to for writing
– EAST
– 62127
– SLOW
– wwwwww wwwwwww
– cramped
– nervous
– feverly
– pass this on (knife)
– another
– sans serifs
– travelling list
– hyphen
– <br>
– piep.
– mit Quittung
– as soon as you go
– sit set sad
– offline
– mercystreet
– nackt
– unbound
– google lists
– backup service
– plan to follow
– things to forget
– September 14th 2011
– very small kitchen
– bigger bedroom
– systematic changes
– low
– highlighter
– zwergnase
– kidsnoharm
– endless endeavor
– lightbox
– extension
– lies
– for varying degrees
– download enhance
– getting close
– l@#1!
– beware
– nothing in particular
– rename
– renew
– ask me
– frowny
– ninetofive
– löä
– good luck
– list of lists
– milkymist
– quick coffee
– keyless
– aus
– tommorrow already
– lästig
– because i know
– maybe
– finishing
– lagos
– Mary.
– pheasant
– choosing
– paypal
– delayer
– so sorry
– dibelief
– conjunct
– Farbton / Sättigung
– raisin
– schreihals
– meadows
– Life’s Good ; )
– needokeep
– koppla
– anstrengend
– roman
– kloot
– only only
– 1:1
– hurt
– ggbfls
– bloß weg
– mops
– berlin
– even
– 5 am
– forcefully lowercased

VerySmallKitchen writes: Stefan Riebel visited X Marks The Bökship on September 5th, 2011, the first day of my four month writer-in-residency. He was visiting London to perform with Filipa Guimarães at the Wimbledon Collage of Art. A week later Stefan emailed the text above,  the seventh installment of his ongoing project somethings.

somethings is a series of language works Stefan sub-titles a gathering of “specific intentions, descriptions, poems and illusions.”  In a broader methodological statement this description turns prefaces a litany:

*

07/ for VerySmallKitchen was sent to me as a list in an .rtf file, as above but in Helvetica Neue. It appears on Stefan’s web site as a word grid that re-orders itself every 30 seconds . This mutability is evident in other works in the somethings series which, as well as their appearance on his web page, are realised by being projected and editioned as letter-seed kits/packets.

In an email, Stefan described the images in this VSK Project as “documentation of former realisations.” He noted “i do not have one illustrating the word set for verysmallkitchen, maybe you have an image for it ?”  I decided 02/10/11 to realise the following text:

… I recognise words/ entries as notations of things we talked about,  looked at, and moved amongst. Other words, which might also be transcriptions, remain mysterious. Perhaps the notation is in a language I/ both of us don’t know, which includes any English/ German.  Compared to transcription, notation accepts it has already forgotten. This gift holds in its distance-making.

Even as we talk together context is multiple (places/ languages/ moods/ times). This is only (politely) evident in the text, which could never be true to a single encounter, so is always layering infidelities upon infidelities. To try and trace its logic through a trail of referents is to admit the reader’s ridiculousness.

Error and Misspelling are not useful categories for reading. Punctuation or acronym are as immediate and vernacular here as speech and vice versa. Journal as data entry. Statements of emotion and mood might be html. Semi-colon and bracket make a smiley face.  The robot’s I remember is as funny as Joe Brainard’s.

This text holds close – through words and title – to (our) encounter.  It seems wrong to emphaise impersonality. Language’s non-personicity here (to invert a phrase Alain Robbe-Grillet uses of Roland Barthes’ texts in WHY I LOVE BARTHES)  is not smoothed by an evident constraint or system, nor known by its (appropriated) source. I should focus instead on the personicity your text offers evidence of.

To accommodate these tensions go empty the words into your city. This happens when words are projected in gallery or on a shop front or turned into seed-letter packets. When there are “only” the words – as in 07/ for VerySmallKitchen – it is the reader’s intelligence that becomes city via a meaning not threatened by sudden re-arrangements, ever attentive to the specifics of any multiple scaled event.

One example. Disblief ( I think) is dibelief.. .to (nearly) die keep the I but lose the plurality. Then blink. No internet. A conversation is an equality of berlin and raisin. Realise. If this is a new grammar then of course a proper name brings its own full stop as (almost) part of itself.

*

More info about Stefan’s work here. Co-founder of the institut für alles mögliche (institiute for all kinds of things) Stefan is now collaborating on the  Abteilung Für Alles Andere (department for everything else) which will run from September 2011- September 2012 as “a temporary office / laboratory / initiative for art and everything else.”

Films from Stefan’s UNTITLED project were included in I AM NOT A POET at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh  in August 2011 and are online here. View the complete series here.