About:
Situating the Approach
A friend shows us around in Coimbra, a city with a very old university. The social sciences building is among the oldest of the buildings. A cute, narrow library looks over the medieval old-town. A table in the very back offers some Journals and other Periodicals discarded by the library for the visitors to take home. Among them, there are many Issues of a journal titled “Revista de Cultura”. The Journal is edited by an “Instituto Cultural de Macao”. Macao is a former Portuguese Colony on Chinese territory. Some Journals on the table are in Portuguese, some in Mandarin and some in English.
Describing the Method
Some days later, we are sitting at a café table in Lisbon, browsing and reading through our treasures. The Magazines are heavy, and we are on a journey. All that we keep, we must carry on our backs for another month. So we start reading with a paper knife, at first intending to cut out the most interesting articles to read on the way. The magazines have intriguing images. They are of expensive, glossy print. That is what makes their weight. They are full of images: photographies some, but mostly archival material, old drawings and sketches. We start to cut out pictures too, producing holes in the pages that now frame parts of the page below. It is intriguing to cut deeper, exploring new images and text passages filtered and framed by the shape of images already cut out, by the layout decisions of the editors and our specific curiosity. The framing discloses portions of text and image without any introductory start or ending. The passages are removed from their immediate con-text, but they remain in a rich contextualization delivered by the Journal as a whole. This set-up guides our attention away from the article's narration and towards the language of the text. Rhetorical elements and specific expressions, that are usually legitimated by a scientific narration in the context of their article, and thus made discreet and unsuspicious, suddenly stick out in their specificity. We start to cut loose expressions that tickle us, because they create a colonial echo. If we fold them back, they reveal other expressions. They let us see what “hides behind them”. As the Layout is very consistent, the lines of text on different pages are congruent. We create new text by removing or folding words away.