Helen Clarke |

Edited by Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland

Essays by Helen Clarke, Sam Dolbear, & Christian A. Wollin

THE LOST DIAGRAMS

Cos Ahmet, Alberto Alessi, Sam Ayres, Patrizia Bach, Martin Beutler,Riccardo Boglione,Vibe Bredahl,

Pavel Buchler & Nina Chua, Emma Cheatle, cris cheek, Kirsten Cooke, Anne-Marie Creamer, Amy Cutler,

Vincent Dachy, Matthew Dowell, Joanna Leah Geldard, Theresa Goessmann, Michael Hampton, Ronny Hardliz, Miranda Iossifidis, Joe Jefford, Dean Kenning, Tracy Mackenna, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, John McDowall, Katharine Meynell, Paul O’Kane, Hephzibah Rendle-Short, Mark Riley, Katya Robin, Hattie Salisbury, Isabella Streffen, Stefan Szczelkun, George Themistokleous, Monique Ulrich, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Matthew Wang, Julie Warburton, Alexander White, Lada Wilson, Louise K. Wilson, Mark Wingrave, Mary Yacoob.

Available here and here.

In A Berlin Chronicle Walter Benjamin describes his autobiography as a space to be walked (indeed, it is a labyrinth, with entrances he calls primal acquaintances). The contributors to The Lost Diagrams respond to the invitation to accompany Benjamin in reproducing the web of connections of his diagram, which, once lost (he was inconsolable), was never fully redrawn. They translate his words into maps, trees, lists, and constellations. Their diagrams, after Benjamin, are fragments, scribbles, indexes, bed covers, and body parts. Subjectivities sharpen and blur, merge and redefine, scatter and recollect. Benjamin writes: ‘Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life’.

In ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) Benjamin describes a lost diagram:

I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous- situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them—at least those that remain in our memory—for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life.

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, 1932, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso, pp. 293–346

We are looking for submissions of diagrams in response to this description. A selection of submissions will be published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in June 2017, and presented at MISS READ: Berlin Art Book Festival 2017, July, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The book will include essays by Sam Dolbear and Christian Wollin with an introduction by Helen Clarke, and is edited by Helen Clarke and Sharon Kivland.

The publication will be a perfect bound paperback, page size 140 mm x 205 mm, portrait format. The scale of page must be considered when submitting: that is, as a double-page image in a landscape format, or single page portrait format. If submitting in landscape format ,please work to a page size of 205 mm x 280 mm and allow for a small gutter loss.

Submissions should be made to lostdiagrams@gmail.com. Only a single submission may be made. Please note that submissions must comply with the following in order to be considered:

• Image: black and white ONLY

• Image: sent as a TIFF

• Deadline of 31 March 2017 (midnight)

Applicants will be notified by 15 April 2017, if their submission has been selected for publication.

The editors and publisher very much regret that they are unable to offer a fee. Each contributor will receive a copy of the book.

The Lost Diagrams Facebook page can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/LostDiagrams/

Helen Clarke

The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin’s lost diagrams