Exhibition: Postcards For Perec
Postcards for Perec - Two Hundred and Forty-Three Postcards in Real Colour is a travelling exhibition curated by alum Linda Parr and you can see it at the Institut français d'Ecosse in February!
About Exhibition: Postcards For Perec
Two Hundred and Forty-Three Postcards in Real Colour.
Georges Perec (1936-1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play. Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969; A Void) was written entirely without using the letter e, as was its translation. A companion piece of sorts appeared in 1972 with the novella Les Revenentes (published in English as The Exeter Text), in which every word has only e as its vowel.
In 1978, Georges Perec created 243 postcard messages which described a lifetime of carefree holidays across the world. The descriptions are seemingly random, but they were constructed along mathematical rules with many literary references. Despite their description “in Real Colour”, they are only postcard messages, with no holiday pictures at all, and entirely black and white. The project “Postcards For Perec” by artist Linda Parr responds to Perec’s messages by producing the missing images, postcards were sent from artists in twenty-three countries. First exhibited in Bower Ashton Library of University of the West of England, the postcards now themselves travel across the world.
A catalogue is available containing all the images, with a foreword by Philip Terry editor of the Penguin Book Of Oulipo, and bilingual essays from Mireille Ribière who explains Perec’s fiendishly complicated arrangement of the phrases. An article describing the engagement and progress of the project is due out in the online journal from UCL Press, ‘Paper Trails’.
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