If You Don’t Know, Why Are You Asking? 2016 - 2017

Commissioned by Критика и Хуманистика
(Critique and Humanistic Publishing House, So a, Bulgaria) Published as an insert in Sociological Problems, 2016 issue 4-5

Materials & Actions:

Hand-drawn map made in collaboration with Michael Joyce

Digital print on paper, 36in x 48in, travel to visit and spend time on the sites mentioned in Michael Joyce’s 2015 novel Foucault in Winter in the Linnaeus Garden

This map is part of a drawing and writing project I made in collaboration with Michael Joyce, one of the fathers of hyper ction. The project is based on his 2015 novel Foucault in Winter in the Linnaeus Garden–a polylingual, operatic fantasy comprised of invented letters, based on Foucault’s work, especially Madness and Civilization.

The map we created shows existing rivers, mountains and human settlements. They overlap with images from conversations that Michael and I had at several locations, from New Hamburg and Nyack, New York, to Marcel Broodthaers’ exhibition at MoMA.

I traveled to Sweden, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria and Texas, to visit various locations mentioned in the novel, as well as ones not mentioned, but relevant to our discussions about Foucault. The sites include Carl Linnaeus Botanical Garden at Uppsala University, Sweden; Albrecht Dürer’s studio in Nuremberg; Hieronymus Bosch’s Fifth Centenary Exhibition at the Prado, Madrid (Foucault writes in his Madness and Civilization about Bosch’s painting Ship of Fools); and Harry Ransom Center Manuscript Collection at The University of Texas at Austin.

Michael Joyce and I wrote an essay to accompany the map, as a parallel, Deleuzian fold, which aims to further unravel our connection to each other (we first met through this project), and traces our relationship to Michel Foucault’s unsettling and provocative endeavor.