Smudged Soil
Hamburger Community Exhibition
Kicking off the 2022 Hamburger Community Residency program, artist Dennis Muñoz Espadiña has lead the new residents through a month-long-get-your-hands-dirty program to explore the materiality, performability and smudginess of RISO printing and small press publishing. Drawing inspiration from Helena Grande’s* poetry pamphlet Night Soil, as well as the street-walk rubbings of artist Sari Dienes, the mentorship of Muñoz Espadiña has takes an unorthodox approach to the usual pre-press and computer editing process connected to digital stencil duplication.
Night Soil is an old euphemism for poop. A term that refers to how excrements were collected at night before the sewage system was created. At night, when everybody was sleeping, cleaners collected and transported human waste to hidden places. People woke up to a tidy city, except cleaners who were relegated to stay away from society because they were all night in touch with the collective dirt.
The mentorship is an experiment to build a bridge between the practice of printing and publishing, and these above mentioned, hidden places where our collective waste is collected; giving leeway to the residents to explore and deconstruct the processes of printed matter through/with their bodies rather than their minds. As the title of this project conspicuously states: we favor dirty hands; scrunched up paper; broken nails; smudged fingertips; bruised arms; torn edges and sweat drenched clothes to save us from the tyranny of neatly stacked piles of crisp white paper.
*Helena Grande is a writer, curator and translator currently based in New York City where she studies a MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Speech Choke(published by Hocus Bogus Publishing). Her stories have appeared in Fictional Journal and the anthology book DW Cities Amsterdam and her essays in A*Desk, nY and Research Catalog.
With Simon Keizer, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Natalia Sorzano, Hasret Emine and Lucija Gregov, in collaboration with Dennis Muñoz Espadiña / Hocus Bogus Publishing
Expo opening hours during MOMO Festival
Fri 15:00 – 20:00
Sat 12:00 – 20:00
Sun 12:00 – 20:00