Page Not Found and the Master Experimental Publishing (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, invite you to the launch of the Special Issue “This Box Found You For A Reason”.

Under the guidance of artist Lídia Pereira and the XPUB staff, the master students explored how features of (video)games are making us more, not less, productive. Life and work are ‘gamified’ through social media, dating apps, and fitness apps designed to increase motivation and productivity. Gamification blurs the lines between play, leisure and labour, to release our collective dopamine for profit. Games in themselves often perform a reproductive role, presenting capitalism as a system of natural laws, exemplified by in-game predatory monetisation schemes. On the other hand, games provide necessary down time and relaxation, helping people function in a largely dysfunctional economy and society. Yet leisure remains a contested space which is still unequally distributed, between genders, ethnicities and abilities. The form of the publication reworks the figure of the loot box, a typically virtual and predatory monetisation scheme.

The launch features presentations by the XPUB students and a discussion with Sepp Eckenhaussen and Koen Bartijn, directors of Platform BK. They will engage in conversation on the economics of the publication, and on larger questions of how the labour of artists and designers is valued and what structures, guidelines and policies can help (small scale) institutions ensure that these practices remain sustainable.

Platform BK researches the role of art in society and takes action for a better art policy. It represents artists, curators, designers, critics and other cultural producers.

Special Issue #17 is co-published by Page Not Found and XPUB, and made by Supisara Burapachaisri, Mitsa Chaida, Kimberley Cosmilla, Erica Gargaglione, Carmen Gray, Jian Haake, Chaeyoung Kim, Francesco Luzzana, Ål Nik (Alexandra Nikolova), Lídia Pereira (ed.), Emma Prato, Gersande Schellinx and Miriam Schöb. 

Starts at 18:00 and ends at 21:00.

This is a free event. No reservation is required.

Photo: Louisa Teichmann.

As Rewire Festival 2022 fills The Hague with cutting-edge music, it also lands at Page Not Found on 8, 9 and 10 April.

RITUAL invites you into an experimental series that explores the many different elements that form a ritual. Rituals, as symbolic acts, represent and pass on the values and orders on which a community is based. While often described as spiritual and transcendent, they equally ground us into our daily lives and help us connect with our surroundings, each other, and ourselves. Through a sequence of collaborations with artists on themes such as Attention, Ceremony, Closure, Connectivity, Resonance and Technology, RITUAL will serve as an entry into collectivity and cohesion.

“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being at home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house.” – Byung Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present.

Day-to-day program:

RITUAL: Zine launch with sonic meditations by Kristin Norderval — Friday April 8, 16:00

RITUAL: Resonance, talk by Brandon LaBelle — Friday April 8, Saturday April 9, Sunday April 10, 13:00-13:45

RITUAL: Attention with FUJI|||||||||||TA, presenting his film ‘soramimi’ — Friday April 8 & Saturday April 9, 14:00-17:00, and Sunday April 10, 15:00-18:00

RITUAL: Power with M Lamar, reading from bell hooks — Sunday April 10, 14:00-14:45

Rewire Timetable

All Rewire events at Page Not Found are free entry.

The Hague-based artist Marianna Maruyama is our 2022 artist-in-residence! During the residency, Maruyama will unfold her long-term research around termite colonies in the program “Living Archives”.

For this event, she is honored to invite the Italian accredited conservator Giovanni Pagani to discuss the basic principles of conservation and preservation from an ethical standpoint, while exploring some of ‘losing battles’ of book conservation. Beginning with a short introduction about the book as an object that carries a message, while looking at its cultural heritage status, he will discuss the materiality of the book, its organic properties and the ways in which it is modified by time – processes of death, in other words. The workshop will invite the audience to make an informed approach to dealing with an ancient book in need of restoration, based on an actual case study. Finally, Pagani will share his recent experiences and challenges with book conservation and restoration projects in Egypt and Gaza. 

Over the past two years Maruyama has been moving – physically and imaginatively – between The Hague and Rome in search of what she calls  ‘termitic space’. Termites offer limitless ways of thinking about more-than-human intelligence by provoking questions about social life and the concept of the individual, blurring boundaries between the animate and inanimate, and mixing temporalities. Thinking alongside the works of Anna Tsing, Rosi Braidotti, Caitlin DeSilvey, Lisa Margonelli, and others, Maruyama is interested in how cultural heritage might be understood from the perspective of the insects that live off of it — and in it — in addition to the ones who produce it or conserve it. For Maruyama, termites offer different ways of thinking about loss, and prompt a deeper understanding of the life and death cycle of a publication.

Marianna Maruyama is an artist and writer. Previous publications include: Performing Security (The Fifth Season, 2019), Translation in The Dark (Casco/DAI, 2014), Translation as Method (Kunstlicht, 2017), Three Movements (Casco/DAI, 2013), and Farocki’s Living Room (Harun Farocki Institut, 2018). Since 2016, she has been active as an artist-consultant at the invitation of the Sedje Hémon Foundation in The Hague.

Giovanni Pagani completed an M.A. in Book Conservation from the European School for Conservators-Restorers of Book Materials, Spoleto, Italy. He manages a private conservation studio, Re.Li.C., in Rome, working for national and international institutions, such as the Vatican Library. Giovanni has worked as a conservation teacher at the universities of Rome and Salerno. He is also the conservator librarian and archivist of the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Maria del Pilastrello in Lendinara. For the past 12 years he has been working especially for libraries and archives of the Dioceses in the Marche region, where in 2020 he created Recanati e Restauro, a not-profit social enterprise aiming to enhance and promote cultural heritage.

Starts at 18:00.

This is a free event.