Wiels | EN

Extending a long-standing dialogue, the book focuses on Oorebeek’s practice, tracing the movement from public space to artwork and back to the printed page. It probes this process through the interplay of reproduced images and texts, captions, and descriptions. This conversation will delve into the making of O B S T A K L E S, highlighting its attention to format, index, process, translation, metre and materiality, as well as the ways printed matter shapes and reflects artistic practice.

O B S T A K L E S, by no means complete nor comprehensive, contains something like one hundred and twenty descriptions: re-readings of fifty years of Willem Oorebeek’s work and the materiality of production, initially written to inform the curator. These are numbered according to recollection, organised under headings, and translated from Dutch to English. The translations are coloured by two years of conversation—accounting for ambiguity, mistakes, and an [un]conscious preference for “ofschoon..”. “quasi-” “enzovoort.” Repetition, alliteration and other material, musical and metric devices [“every election perpetuates this sincerely fragile momentum”] are placed on the page, quite intentionally, designed for memory & recall. 

BIO

Typographer Will Holder produces artists’ books. From 2007–24 he also edited and published F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with the organisation of reading & writing in the arts (co-published with de Appel, Amsterdam 2007–16, and KW, Berlin 2017–24). All of his work with artists, musicians, dancers, readers & audiences uses conversation as model and means for reading, writing and producing documents; by way of speech, performance and transcription, onto and off the page.