スウェーデン人アーティスト、フィア・バックストローム（Fia Backström）の作品集。2点のパフォーマンス作品の台本を基盤に、作者による視覚言語や話し言葉、グローバルなコミュニティ、官僚的な専門用語、気分障害やコミュニケーション障害に関する探求をさらに拡張させた一冊。本書の第一部である「Aphasia as a visual way of speaking, on A-production and other language syndromes」は、4つのパートに分けられたテキストから成っている。この台本がニューヨークの「The Poetry Project」で公演された際、作者は台本を会場の床や壁にグリッド状に並べてみせた。作者は床の上で身体を移動させるようにしてテキストを読み、そうすることでテキストの線形を基盤とした構造を分解し、その身体が原稿に触れるたびに新たなテキストを挿入した。本書では、分解のプロセスを残すために、別のテキストのかたまりを4パート内にランダムに配置し、数学記号を用いて文章の各部分とリンクさせた。よって、物質的な作者のパフォーマンスと同じように、読者はバラバラで非線形に台本を読むことができるのだ。

第二の台本の「ME must be turned upside down to become WE」は第一の台本のエピローグであり、複数の演者が「最初から最後まで、セリフを割り当てられることなく、順番を与えられることなく、時には同時に読み上げる」ように進めなければならない。

EメールやiPhoneのメモ、科学論文まで、作者自身が制作に用いた資料やテクノロジーを振り返るために、本書は図表によって展開される。英語と、作者の母語であるスウェーデン語から選り抜かれた数多の要素をハイブリッドなスタイルで収めた。こうした言語の掛け合わせは、誤訳や記述的言語がいかに地理学的境界線やメディア・フレーム、社会的コミュニティを越えて、実用的かつ進化し続ける言語として機能するかということに対する作者の関心を明確に表している。

COOP a-script is an artist book based on two performance scripts by Fia Backström, extending her exploration of visual and spoken language, global community, bureaucratic jargon, and mood and communication disorders. The first section of the book, “Aphasia as a visual way of speaking, on A-production and other language syndromes,” consists of a text written in four parts. When this work was performed at The Poetry Project in New York City, the artist organized the script across the venue’s floor and wall in a grid. To read the text, Backström moved her body across the floor, fragmenting the linear base structure of the text and inserting additional texts as her body made contact with the manuscript. Within this book, this process of fragmentation is preserved with passages linked by mathematical symbols to the second set of texts, which are placed at random within the four parts. This allows the reader to experience a fractured, non-linear reading of the script in line with the artist’s performance of the material.

The second script, “ME must be turned upside down to become WE,” serves as an epilogue to the first script, and is to be read by several performers “reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, in no particular turn, and sometimes simultaneously.”

COOP a-script has been developed graphically by Backström to reflect back to the sources and technologies used to create the work, which range from emails and iPhone notes to scientific reports. The book retains many elements of a hybrid style that culls from English and Swedish, Backström’s native language. This hybridization of language underscores the artist’s interest in the way that mistranslations and descriptive linguistics can operate as functional, evolving languages across geographic borders, media frames, and social communities.

Fia Backström is an artist based in New York. Since the late 90s, her text-based practice has included photography, performance, events, installation, and writing. In the early 2000s, Backström created some of her exhibitions as “a fia backström production,” where she included other artists’ works to create installations that played with group show conventions. Backström continues to comment on collective engagement—often through the photographic image and by incorporating other artists into her installations and performances—and explorations of conventions of display.