Video essay by Francisco Varela
School of Fine Arts,  Master of Museological
and Curatorial Studies, University of Porto
in collaboration with paula roush
School of Arts and Creative Industries
London South Bank University

Video Editing by Tee Byford
Narrated by Elizabeth Gleave
Credits and acknowlegements

Connections – Exploring Heritage,
Architecture, Cities, Art, Media
University of Kent, Canterbury;
AMPS (Architecture_Media_Politics_Society)
29-30 June 2020
Programme [pdf]
Connections video channel

 ACI Research and Enterprise Conference
London South Bank University
School of Arts and Creative Industries
8 July 2020

 

Francisco Varela, 
The Expanded Practice  of the Artist’s Book:
Immersion in the Artist’s Museum

The essay is about Portuguese, London-based artist paula roush, whose artistic practice presents itself as a unique case study of a live–work method. It is the aim of this essay to analyse, contextualize and query the principles that guide this method. It is an artistic and experiential practice that performs a reinterpretation of the city through collection, research and display of materials as well as an idiosyncratic practice of space making.  This is achieved through an immersive practice that results in artefacts and books the artist creates and in the musealisation of the architectural spaces she occupies.
1-THE EXPANDED PRACTICE OF THE ARTIST’S BOOK
First section of the essay explores the “expanded” characteristics of the artist’s book, probing whether this notion is extensible to the activity of space production practiced in her house–studio–gallery, an activity which is unique to and inseparable from her live-work method. These artistic methodologies are clarified within an interdisciplinary framework that includes the concepts of “autoethnography,” “space–time sequence” and “contemporaneity.” 2-THE ART OF IMMERSION: COLLECTION, RESEARCH, DISPLAY
Second section explores the notion of “dispositif,” with the intention to reveal the multiple structuring elements of a live–work practice here called “immersive.”
3-MUSEOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST’S STUDIO: THE ARTIST’S MUSEUM
Third section analyses the “museographic” process inherent to paula’s space, a practice associated to the house–studio–gallery. This live–work–curation method is identified in relation to various museological frameworks that are exercised in that space.