Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1148959
THIS WEEK BOOKS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 JULY 2019 6 Could you tell us a little bit about Soon out of Context? It appears to be designed as a curio from the get-go – an object in and of itself, apart from also being a book... It's essentially a curated series of spreads, each containing a short writ- ten piece on the left and an image on the right, respectively. The text parts were lifted from my own writings while the images were taken from old publications now fallen to the public domain and available through free on- line archives such as archive.org. I had developed a habit of collecting these images for no real reason after bump- ing into related blogs online, out of the sheer sense of 'awe' at their evoca- tive power and fascination with the fact that all they were really intended to do was 'illustrate' some basic thing (for example, pools and swings). In a similar fashion, the text was taken from heaps of fragments that I had put aside over the years as 'leads' to be developed and expanded. These frag- ments ultimately just grew in number without growing in scope, resulting in pieces belonging to a larger 'context' that never took shape. The publication at large is about the assembly of found material. Unlike what is usually meant by a collage, though, there was never any inten- tion to blur any boundaries between the different elements, fusing all into 'one thing' which uses found things as its fabric. The exercise here was much more basic in nature: a matter of presenting things in abstraction, in their integrity as individuals, next to one other, in an attempt to repurpose them, creating some extended poetic discourse. It's not hard to imagine why then for me it's much more 'I created an object' rather than 'I wrote a book'. What was the initial process of putting the book together like? Did you always have a tendency to gather the kind of curiosities and verbal/visual ephemera which make up the final book? And how did your collaboration with Josmar Azzopardi come into it? My creative process typically re- volves a lot around using 'complete things' as raw materials or instru- ments. Sometimes I 'generate' the raw material myself, while other times I see things that strike me in some way… and I hoard profusely and catalogue sporadically. I like 'tak- ing' things and I like the idea of copy- ing badly, creating something else. A typical example is a situation where I would be listening to some song or audiobook in the car, and I misun- derstand some lyric or phrase, which I would then keep repeating and re- shaping in my head till I get to where I need to go, park the car and write the product of all that on my phone. The limited length of the written pieces could very well be, in fact, a reflection of how short (my) car rides and commuting times are in Malta… In the particular case of this book, at one point it struck me that I had all these fragments of text without context and all these images I had willingly stripped of their original context... that's where the basic idea came from. I then immediately approached Jos- mar, who has been, across all my ar- tistic curiosities, the closest thing I can think of to a consistent and holistic mentor and chief editor of my work. Given my approach of 'generating a large volume of raw data to use later', Josmar very frequently is who I turn TEODOR RELJIC speaks to architect and musician Nigel Baldacchino about his first foray into publishing, as the small collage-book 'Soon Out of Context', conceived in collaboration with Josmar Azzopardi, is released through indie US publisher Unsolicited Press Ephemeral mash-ups from the stranded rock Teodor Reljic