In 2015, the Frans Masereel Centre started a collaboration with Geys to publish parts of his archive. The first archive publication, Archief 1 and Archief 2, consists of two thick volumes in A4 format with more than 800 scanned archive documents, and appeared on the occasion of Geys’s solo exhibition in the SMAK in 2015. The material was presented as it was, without any explanation or hierarchy.

Archief 4 (2017) begins with a detailed index of Geys’ archive, a complete station novel with annotations by Geys, and continues with documents relating to cultural subsidies and correspondence concerning the foundation of an association for visual artists who fought in the early seventies for a social status for visual artists.

An animation of the contents of the book courtesy of the Frans Masereel Centre can be seen here.

Carrot Jokes are a genre of dense, joke-like texts first proposed by cognitive linguists Chlopicki and Petray (1981) to undermine emerging computational models of humor analysis. These jokes, further developed by others in the field, depend on a preponderance of background incongruities, blunt omissions, faulty script switch-triggers, “gray” implicature, and missing links in inferencing.

Michael Portnoy’s practice spans dance-theater, vocal power-tools, Relational Stalinism, reptangles, abstract gambling, the improvement of biennials, and Icelandic cockroach porn. His art circles the rules of play and communication—language itself playing a crucial role in the works.

A book inspired by Bloom’s installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Kunstverein München, and the Endlichkeit der Freiheit exhibition in post-wall Berlin. The title, Never Odd or Even, is a palindrome, which parallels the artist’s investigation into the workings of symmetry and order that occurs in nature (as with butterflies and twins) and in culture (the architecture of Chinese palaces, formal gardens, Palladio, and the Nazi structures of Albert Speer). Exploring both the beauty and the horror of the ordering principles of symmetry, Never Odd or Even contains some of Bloom’s most memorable discoveries (such as a photo of identical twins showing Johnny Carson their butterfly collection). A must for Nabokov fans, whose lepidopterist spirit is conjured throughout. Presented in the form of leaves which the reader must cut apart with a knife.

Wild Plants of Palestine follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.

In 1949 Munari designed for the first time a series of “libri illeggibili” (illegible books), which abandoned textual communication in behalf of aesthetic function only. Paper is no longer the support of only text, but it also communicates a message through the format, the colour, the cuts and their successions. The elements that usually set up a book (like the colophon and the title-page) are removed, and the reading seems the execution of a melody, with always different tones during the sequence of the pages.