The Book To Come
Session six, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group: ‘Beginning with MTL’, proposed by Karl Larsson. Photo: Bulegoa z/b.
Thursday 10 December 2015
‘Beginning with MTL’, proposed by Karl Larsson
4pm / Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao / Session six, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group.
“Certain things seem to have been done with such clarity when looked back on many years later. Some people say: Marcel Broodthaers used to be a poet, then he became an artist and then even a film maker. Some say Rimbaud used to be a super young lyrical genius until he grew tired of it all and moved to Africa to become an oppressor. And so come stories of before and after. Like the one about how Broodthaers’ children proudly walked about in rags knowing their father was a poet, but felt completely betrayed when he started to produce and sell objects. How a family bookshop was a place for kids to play in after school, but a studio somewhere they had to keep out of at all costs.
I’d like to think poetry always has to invent its own form. That it's not poetry until it has gone through a complete state of transformation and somehow “refreshed” itself or turned out completely new—like really, really new... like HERE, NOW, NOW new. So that in a sense you can never say “this is what it is supposed to look like” or “this is how it has always been done before”. Beginning with MTL, which was a display of notifications, scribbles, sketches, in the form of an exhibition, I would like to discuss the possibility of new returns, never endings, illusions, loops and beautiful exact moments. But also children. How they sometimes just stop and turn towards you and say a word, a completely perfect word but in a completely wrong setting and become instant strangers, even monsters, for a millisecond before they skip away.”—Karl Larsson
Karl Larsson (Kristianstad, 1977) is a Swedish poet and artist living in Berlin and Malmö. His work is developed within the margins of writing and language, poetry and installation and has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in venues such as Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland; Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg; Castillo/Corrales, Paris; Signal, Malmö; CAC, Vilnius. Group exhibition venues include Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Alhóndiga Bilbao, Bilbao; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Komplot, Brussels; CAC, Vilnius; Frutta, Rome, NGBK, Berlin. Some of his publications are: Strange, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2015; Form/Force, Walther König Verlag DE and Black Square US, 2013; Poetical Assumption, Torpedo JVE, NO/NL, 2012; Consensus (The Room), Paraguay Press, FR, 2012; Parrot, Paraguay Press, FR, 2010.