Launch of Toponym / Sunday 12 October 2014, 2 – 5pm

Sunday 12 October 2014, 2 – 5pm
Launch of Toponym
By Lia Na’ama ten Brink
Published by LemonMelon 2014
£15 | Softback | 100pp | ISBN 978 1 908260 14 7 | 200 copies

‘Missionaries used to speak of dreams as the god of the savage, but through my hands they have always slipped like mercury …’

Toponym is a work of poetic-documentary montage, a journey through form that segues between found texts and images, traversing registers that are in turn technical, lyrical, scientific and archival. Its compass extends from the illuminators of medieval Central Asia to the nocturnal cormorant fishermen of 1950s Peking; from a surveyor’s passage through Victorian London to an historian’s taxonomy of shadow; and from Renaissance autobiography to the musicological diagrams of a modernist composer.
Where once narrative was shared in the ritualised gatherings of Boccaccio’s Florentine storytelling nobility, or imparted through the rites and festivities of the ancient Roman calendar, in Toponym it becomes a polyphony of verbal and visual fragments haunted by the placelessness that is the mark of the library, the archive and the imagination. The act of reading moves beyond language: unfurling across material surfaces, articulating the mineral and the molecular, the chromatic and the textile.

The Toponym book launch will take place in the Bökship during the opening of the second part of Revolver II at Matt’s Gallery. A small installation of archive films will be showing in the shop during the launch.