Paula Hutchings

EDITIONS ERRANTES WALTER BENJAMIN À PARIS: AILLEURS EDITION OF 100, 50 SIGNED AND NUMBERED. PRINTED AT TYPECRAFT, PASADENA CA. FOLIO OF 50 PAGES. Walter Benjamin à Paris: Ailleurs Walter Benjamin in Paris : Elsewhere An artist book based on the passage of time through 50 pages of places names, lieux, and cities : an archive of WB’s wanderings. The visual...

  The booklet WB/CB…distillation is a exploration of a chance word choice / encounter with each of the 50 pages of Walter Benjamin’s “Convolute J ” in his magnus opus : Passagen -Werk, Livre des Passages, or Arcades Project as it has come to be known in English. Covolute J is titled simply "Baudelaire". It is a compilation of research,...

  les Fleurs de WB Flowers of WB: A series of drawings that collects the flowers Benjamin mentions in his letters to Gretel Adorno. Often the context of the flowers in the letters is profound in terms of his experiences, memories, and life situation.  This selection includes his allusions to the psychotropic as well as the more prosaic of his...

In addition to several published "livres d'artiste" ( i.e. Distillation: BenjaminBaudelaire, & Walter Benjamin à Paris et ailleurs), I am involved in a deconstruction of the physical book and a re reading by means of redaction ( Ulysses & Birds of America for WB).  The redaction is done in gouache on the newsprint pages.  Silver and gold employed for the dual monologues...

Most of the collages featured date from a 2018 visit to Portbou, Spain for the "Walter Benjamin Summer School and Seminaire".  His book " one way street" and the essay "Berlin Childhood " guided my choices of images, physical materials and photography.

encountering WB: a re reading  This piece is worked directly on the pages of the 1960s novel ("Birds of America") by the American writer, Mary McCarthy. The story  parallels Benjamin’s own in many ways: a young Jewish student [and flâneur] in Paris, his travels and encounters with cities and lieux.  The novel presents a somewhat brighter mirror to Benajmin's  experiences  (WWI&II, anti-semitisme) ...

This video 'other' or re reading of the two famous Benjamin anthologies (Illuminations and Reflections) came out of a performative act upon the books: the random choice of twenty words from each. The translucency of the paper privileges a slow dissolve in the unearthing and burying of the words one by one as the pages are turned.

    WB : sujet inépuisable.  TEXTE de la séminaire à Grenoble. 2016. Un écrivain allemand et juif qui avait séjourné en France comme étudiant et qui s’y trouvait en exil permanent (son mot était« durable ») dès 1933. Il était critique, collectionneur, philosophe, penseur, traducteur, homme politique et homme mystique. Toujours entre deux pôles, entre deux villes. Issu d’une...

The current photographs of books represent one strand of an ongoing investigation into the nature of text and image, writing and drawing; works in which the common thread is the rectangle and an inception within some aspect of the printed word, whether block of undifferentiated text, isolated letters, or word/extracts. The very word extract is of interest in its double...