This project’s aim is to use the process of translation as a critical means of interrogating printed matter as one of the material registers of institutional power. The work is centered around mark making, record keeping, the artefact, the performative act, and modes of reproduction as strategies for investigating the book form, treating legibility instead as a lens through which text and the signified are made to play within the field of transcription.

My chosen form of printed matter is the graphite block. Not graphite that has been mined from the ground, but rather made of crushed coke and pitch binder, mixed and compressed into molds that are baked at extremely high temperatures. A graphite block that was made artificially, chemically reproduced with petroleum byproducts in a graphite factory. This form of graphite block is a copy, and in that sense a kind of printed matter as well.

I have chosen to use the graphite block as a printer, carefully documenting its edges, its granular topography, its powder residue, across 27, 70 by 100 centimeter pages. Partly graphite rubbing, while also acting as records of my systematic interactions with the block, each page traces a performative act. The traces are made sequentially across the page, assuming a sense of linearity, conforming to the parameters of the book form as a medium. Over the course of these pages, my movements begin to accelerate, become less careful and deliberate. The block starts to pull and tear at the paper, my feet become clammy and leave more visible footprints in the graphite powder that’s cast at the margins. On their own, these rubbings function as an artefact of this choreography. This artefact then, translated linearly as a bookwork, offers a reading into the materiality of the mark as a methodology. The 26.5796 kilo graphite block is painstakingly recorded within the limits of the page, using the diagram as a manner of exploring the mark as the tool through which space is produced.