When the Guests Are Not Looking (2016), artist book
When the Guests Are Not Looking is an extended project consisting of a publication and a series of performances centered on the title character of Denis Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew (1762-1777). In the character of the nephew, Diderot presents a hero of indiscipline, a buffoon and an idler, a subject who operates in the margins of the Enlightenment, a period that is at the root of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity.
The publication consists in a set of index cards each including a drawing as well as a written description of a performance. The performances reflect the spontaneous and irreverent behaviour of the Nephew in Diderot’s book. They constitute open scenarios that have the qualities of ephemerality, of pointlessness, of a gust of wind.
Published by Horse and Sparrow Editions
ISBN: 9780988117013
14 cm x 20.3 cm, 24 pages, 24 ills.
Printed on a risograph machine
August 2016, English
