UGH, NOT ANOTHER LITERATURE REVIEW

Series of snapshots, 2018.

Contrary to rigid and academically loaded scholarly literature reviews, Ugh, Not Another Literature Review acts as a response to this format, its construction and output, offering a place of escape and opening up possibilities of what a literature review could be.

The apparent randomness of the sources — in which the only organisational pattern is the synchronicity of the encounter with a book — operates as a refusal to the expected consistency of an orthodox literature review with regards to a predetermined subject area. In this sense, this literature review does not discuss one particular theme, but it traces the components of the multiple. The juxtaposition of the images reveals the diverse (literary) objects of interest of a given place and for a limited period of time, creating a sort of collective, situated, and mostly ephemeral library.

Though the project does identify and synthesises information, the pictorial, the performative, the material, and the visual composition is put in the forth as opposed to the written text. It does so through a process that is mainly unplanned and instinctive (snapshot against photography). Thus, the spontaneous act of making an image, improvised and performative, is put against the intellectual, evaluative, often logical and deductive of ‘the scientific method’.

Ugh, Not Another Literature Review reviews diverse books distributed along the city of Dessau from February to May 2018. All the images were taken with my iphone immediately after stumbling upon the cover of a book that captured my attention in terms of its pictorial composition and potentiality for being reviewed. The performers (some of which were also the book readers) were mostly friends that happened to be there and were happy to collaborate. The set-up was composed after whatever materials were around, every session took between 1 and 5 minutes, and no more than 10 pictures were taken per scene.

JASMINE BANGLE FOR CAROLINA HERRERA, 2016.