M HKA Ensembles

Book, 18 x 13 cm, 66 p., language : English, publisher : Book Works, London, ISBN : 1-870699-66-1.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/703).

Literary synopsis

Three characters return to a desert commune to tell three stories. Each one continuing until they reach a solution or a dilemma. Developing narratives that could be described as significant and marginal simultaneously. Addressing the urban/non-urban, the border zone and the locations of pre/post-presentation. Tin mining, Hotel California and throwing spoons across bars in Tokyo all contribute to a text that indicates the collapses inherent in any attempt to pin down the shifting state of our urban structures.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Literally No Place was outlined during a public presentation in Brussels for the exhibition ‘Indiscipline’ in 2000. That improvised speech created the basis of this book, which attempts to address how changes in concepts of conscience and ethics have left their trace in the built world.

Gillick makes objects and exhibitions generated from short books that he writes, and The Wood Way (exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery 03 May - 23 June 2002), was elaborated by using the text of Literally No Place, both meditating on the condition of utopian thinking and construction in what appears to be a definitively post-utopian time.

Novel's website