Barcelona, 1 de Junio de 2007.

BY SARAH HOPKINSON

As you may be aware, from the proliferation of gripping hostage crime-dramas on mainstream television, ransom demands are commonly accompanied by an image of the abducted (often blindfolded, looking suitably terrified) holding a local newspaper. I always thought that this role effectively reduced the newspaper to its essence - its currency and locality. Serving primarily as a marker of specific time and place, it acts as unquestionable proof of a subject’s ‘alive-ness’ on a certain day, proof that they continue to exist. For Fiona Connor’s Free Literature newspapers are the sole material. Mining content from a series of tabloids (the ‘free literature’ on a given day), Connor creates a hybrid version of Barcelona’s principal newspaper El Pais.1 The accompanying video (viewable online) offers a short glimpse of Barcelona as a city marked by vast numbers of newspapers, stacked on street corners, littering gutters. Maybe we are supposed to see the newspaper as a leitmotif for a place; a city succinctly summed up in its recurring symbol. One of those funny idiosyncrasies that tourists always notice.

Despite muddying signature styles, and displacing stylistic cohesion (ransom notes are popularly constructed from cut-out magazine and newspaper letters, precisely to prevent authorial detection) the modified El Pais’ spatio-temporality remains intact. In fact, subsuming all other publications into a strange crossbred whole, the newspaper is reduced, via a process of layering and doubling, to its marker of local-ness and current-ness. The collaged result is a mélange of one day’s worth of news; a concoction of information, imagery and advertising, disseminated in a certain city at a particular historical moment: 1 de Junio de 2007.

The content of this chronicle is largely unreadable, but not necessarily incomprehensible. In construction, areas of text and image that resemble one another, deal with the same topical issue or advertise the same product, have been pasted over the ‘master’ edition of El Pais. Idiosyncratic formats, fonts, proportions, wording and colours prevent a seamless assimilation yet a peculiar sense of cohesion prevails. Quite simply, the collaged pieces appear to signify the same (or similar) thing; they speak to shared concerns. The language barrier further allows us, and Connor, to behold this information pared back to its basic sign-value. Guided by the recognisable terms in the headlines, familiar political images (in this instance of pre-election Sarkozy) and ever-present ads for shiny, new-model cars the viewer is faced with a simultaneously discordant and harmonious whole, both foreign and oddly familiar.

While this fittingly subjective product of an encounter with a day in a foreign city maintains a casualness, this is neither a ‘stroll’ nor a meandering journey. It is less flimsy than that, more directed, more decisive, maybe more like a dérive - if we can take the liberty of thinking the ‘terrain’ as the newspaper, as opposed to the city, and the point of departure as El Pais. Despite this abstraction, both practices share a certain situated-ness – the ransom note’s aforementioned crucial spatio-temporal grounding. A paradigmatic derive - the practice of ‘transient passage through varied ambiances’ - took place for one whole day, ‘the time between two periods of sleep’, in a primarily urban setting, as it was in the ‘great industrially transformed cities’ that the social conditioning was considered most pervasive. Like Guy Debord’s practice, Connor is less guided by chance than the ‘psychogeography’ of her chosen environment. Open to the ‘constant currents, fixed points and vortexes,’ Connor is acutely aware and responsive to the recurrence of certain events and imagery, and their varying representational guises.2 The decision-making process has its own logic, developed in the very act of making. Collage causes a necessary fissure or rupture in the previously self-contained microcosm, opening it out to speak to the macrocosm, revealing a communicative system in perpetual movement and flux, constantly slipping and sliding, feeding off and folding in on itself.

Cutting, sampling, reducing, doubling and obscuring, Free Literature unconventionally maps an experience, a city and a moment, via active engagement with a thing inextricable from that experience, city and moment. Can we see the result as one big, unwieldy ransom note? Perhaps, but I am not sure what the demands are, it doesn’t appear to be asking for anything. Maybe just giving testament, maybe working it out for itself.



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