Wittgenstein's theory of language games was constructed by an accumulation of examples: the construction foreman and his assistant, a tailor measuring a suit, a few hypothetical tribes that speak strange languages, the impossibility of a greenish red, et cetera. Suppose then that someone decides to use these examples as a tool. As a way of reading other things. “It is […] essential to our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new from it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we, in a sense, seem not to understand” (Philosophical Investigations, §89).
Suppose that two people are playing a game. They are playing a game and talking. They are playing a game and talking publicly. Someone might see this and think that they are at a conference. They take things out of a box and talk about images, about lines. They talk about toxoplasmosis in rats. Little stories read out loud that when read together may echo the world of a book that is made of examples. Perhaps they are using the examples from the book as a tool, as a sort of prosthetic device – the box works as such a device – that makes them change the tone, or the emphasis, and by doing so, someone understands something. The box will be left at the archive where it can be used to play the piece, with variations.
For the last three years, Erick Beltran and Bernardo Ortiz have constantly talked about the things that led, without them knowing it, to this proposal. While they were talking, two projects would come into being. The first one was the Editorial Project for the 7th Mercosul Bienal (Porto Alegre, Brazil 2009) and the other was The Congress for the 11th Lyon Biennale (Lyon, France 2011). Both projects dealt with images in different ways, with their reproduction and dissemination.
