Mime Radio
2015
Book, 22 x 14 cm, 136 p., language : English, publisher : Bat; Adéra; CRAC Alsace; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Sternberg Press, Berlin, ISBN : 978-3-95679-151-2.
Materials: ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/564).
Literary synopsis
Mime Radio is set in a bar, the Tiki Coco, where a community grows around a series of events, the "Challenge the Reality Open Mic", where every night people are invited to go on stage to present tools and ideas to challenge, affect or at least shake the reality. This is where the hero of this story, Marsyas, escaped from the mythology, will find his voice back, a magical voice that can tell the future, the past and the present time in a single word.
Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice
The material constituting Mime Radio has been recorded and then transcribed through a series of public performances. Telling stories in public is central in Benjamin Seror’s art practice. They are mainly improvised stories giving him the idea of a writer that needs an audience to write. This writer is the narrator of this novel, a sort of fictional writer that would go in bars every night to tell a stories about language and bars. To keep a track of the story during the performances, Seror realized all along the process some models that traces the general lines of his narration.
Authorship: Artist Author.
Creative Strategy: Artwork-Novel Parallel Lives, Open Process, Performance Generates Novel, Reading Performance.
Genre: Adventures, Plain Fiction.
Publishing: Art Books Publishing House.
Theme: Art, Community, Death, Desire, Ghosts, Performative Language, Technology.