This little book with a text by composer, theatre-maker, multimedia artist and theorist Dick Raaijmakers generated a lengthy discussion amongst the panel. Some thought the explosion – in the book literally reproduced by laser-drilled holes in the pages and rendered visible to the reader in the form of an animation by dint of flicking through the pages from the inside out – was over the top; others thought it was a beautiful allegory of the chaos and destruction that Raaijmakers addresses in his text.
Here we have a no longer entirely new ‘dismantled and fragmented’ text about the relationship between destruction and art which has now been reworked and published. It is preceded by a 1931 essay by Walter Benjamin from which Raaijmakers borrows his title. This is a turnover book with Dutch and English text at opposite ends.