Tomorrow opens my MFA thesis exhibition titled "Publishing as tactic: toward a counter-archive practice"—my first solo exhibition—with works developed for the last three years in the program. The reception is scheduled for tomorrow at 5:30 pm in the @binghamgallery at the Fine Arts Building. The show will be on view until March 20th.
For the last three years, our eyes and screens have been bombarded by images of rubble—cities, infrastructure, monuments, people engulfed by debris. In a world where photography is ubiquitous and a camera can be found in every person's pocket, the archive has turned into the greatest paradigm of contemporaneity: what is to be done with the billions of images generated every day?
In this show, I proposed a counter-archive practice that challenges the authority, authorship, and ownership of the institutional apparatus represented by archives, museums, libraries, and universities. I present a strategy of engagement through publishing (but not in the traditional publishing realm): an experimental approach rooted in the revolutionary ethos, where publishing is a structure that facilitates collective communication and organization. Like the scaffolding around a building under construction, it is both provisional and in permanent motion: affordable, modular, adaptable, a metaphor for "in(ter)dependent" (rather than independent) artist publishing.
The show presents a body of work that displays my critical engagement with different archives: leaked classified photos and military documents of a UFO investigation in Brazil; the educational debris from a university's archaeology department collected at a book sale; images from the online British Museum collection; and discarded thesis books found in the trash.
The modular bookshelf that holds my personal collection of books about books and archives invites visitors to use the accompanying printer to make copies of pages from these texts and compile their own zines, readers, and printed ephemera.
We live surrounded by the ruins of past and current empires. The way power manifests in our societies and everyday lives is oftentimes invisible. We must therefore understand the world to change it
"Epistemic Collapse", 2025.
Dimensions Variable.
Bordas encyclopédie: 4- Histoire Universelle (1), Le Monde antique (1968).
What happens if all the photographs in an archeology encyclopedia are removed? That's the question that guided me through the creation/destruction of this work. Diderot's Encyclopédie is perhaps the most famous representation of the thought behind the Enlightenment: the universalizing authority of reason, conquered through the supposed democratization of knowledge (for whom?) that would lead to the so-called progress and modernization granted by the scientific method. Yet this method led us to where we are now: witnessing man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. The encyclopedia and its utopian promise of compiling, archiving, and publishing the entirety of human knowledge rely on the violent imperial processes of extraction, deterritorialization, and decontextualization, visually manifested in the design of the pages. Artifacts and material culture from different ages and cultures are excavated, photographed against a vibrant backdrop, compartmentalized, and organized together in a linear timeline contained by the sequential nature of the book. When these photographs are cut out, the literary language is all that's left in the pages. As this excavation gesture accumulates, trenches reveal the strata of knowledge sedimented in the book. The layout structure surrenders to its own weight, crumbling and collapsing on itself, forming an unstable ruin.
Photos by Igor Arume.
A few detail shots from my MFA thesis exhibition "Publishing as tactic: toward a counter-archive practice", on view from March 9 to 20, 2026.
For the last three years, our eyes and screens have been bombarded by images of rubble—cities, infrastructure, monuments, people engulfed by debris. In a world where photography is ubiquitous and a camera can be found in every person's pocket, the archive has turned into the greatest paradigm of contemporaneity: what is to be done with the billions of images generated every day?
In this show, I proposed a counter-archive practice that challenges the authority, authorship, and ownership of the institutional apparatus represented by archives, museums, libraries, and universities. I present a strategy of engagement through publishing (but not in the traditional publishing realm): an experimental approach rooted in the revolutionary ethos, where publishing is a structure that facilitates collective communication and organization. Like the scaffolding around a building under construction, it is both provisional and in permanent motion: affordable, modular, adaptable, a metaphor for "in(ter)dependent" (rather than independent) artist publishing.
The show presents a body of work that displays my critical engagement with different archives: leaked classified photos and military documents of a UFO investigation in Brazil; the educational debris from a university's archaeology department collected at a book sale; images from the online British Museum collection; and discarded thesis books found in the trash.
The modular bookshelf that holds my personal collection of books about books and archives invites visitors to use the accompanying printer to make copies of pages from these texts and compile their own zines, readers, and printed ephemera.
We live surrounded by the ruins of past and current empires. The way power manifests in our societies and everyday lives is oftentimes invisible. We must therefore understand the world to change it.
📷 by @i_r_o_n_s_i_n_t_l
A glance at my thesis exhibition reception, "Publishing as tactic: toward a counter-archive practice" is the culmination of three years of work in the MFA in Visual Studies program. I'm grateful to everyone who could attend! Documentation photos of every work soon.
Photos by @witwire
The first edition of the CoMO Zine Fair was a blast! Thank you to all 16 artists, collectives and publishers who participated and to everyone who visited the fair! 📚
Photos by @witwire and @igorarume@mizzou_svs@binghamgallery
#comozinefair
