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Rafael Domenech:  The Medium is the Massage

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This is a publication 

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Good Morning! 

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You are here. This is not an exhibition—at least not in the conventional sense. It is an architectural pavilion, a place of coming together. Visitors are encouraged to approach the situation like a book. 

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The Medium is the Massage is a living publication by artist Rafael Domenech. Throughout the duration of this publication-pavilion, visitors are invited into the space to be authors, readers, editors, and publishers. The pavilion is a poem-in-space waiting to be written. With the public’s interventions, the space changes over time, inhabited by new words and experiences. Medium is equipped with a self-publishing station that transforms the gallery from a space of encountering art to a site of production. New books will be printed, posters added, seating arrangements will shift, and words will be disseminated. 

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On an occasional basis, the pavilion will host design classes, public programs, and events. In collaboration with [NAME] publications, a Miami-based press dedicated to marginalized histories within art and design, Medium will release “dispatches”, a limited-run journal focused on anti-extractivist practices and climate struggles, and that alert us to cultural and territorial dispossession.

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The Medium is the Massage is a new commission curated by ICA Senior Curator Sarah Rifky as part of ICA’s year-long curatorial research framework Misread Unread Reread Reread Misread Unread Reread (MURRMUR), which invites artists to think about the environments and methods in which we publish and read and how reading can be reimagined as a situation or experience.

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In addition to the ongoing distribution of publications in the pavilion, at the conclusion of The Medium is the Massage the public will be invited to take home the collectively produced outcomes of the installation. 

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The shape of things 

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The Medium is the Massage is composed of two collapsed grids that create two intersecting spaces. The architecture is editorial; poetry runs along the edges of things like a wild plant species. The text is set in a custom typeface “ICA” designed by the artist for this occasion: it is split and offset—a font in disagreement. The typography echoes the horizontal monumentality of the pavilion architecture. Objects-as-punctuation are suspended throughout the space–printed matter as glowing light objects–made of images processed in a custom rigged scanner that rotates the images, creating visual accidents and glitches as part of the work. 

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The Medium is the Massage is a spatial poem, an ecosystem that seeks to transform the public’s expectation of what an exhibition is—and what an exhibition wants from its public. Rafael’s Medium is a lot like Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s Massage (1966)—a coming together of words, texts, images and effects that reshape how we experience what an exhibition might be, and our experience of being a public. Rafael’s Medium applies the principles of collage to the thought and writing of other twentieth century poets, philosophers and media theorists who have paid a great deal of attention to communication as worldbuilding. Other key references for Rafael are the poet philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose writing has delved into the nature of communication and technical imagination and Édouard Glissant whose “poetics of relation” demonstrates how the awareness of self and surroundings is integral in transforming the world.

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Rafael recognizes the effect of standards and specifications that shape our everyday surroundings, he thinks with the properties of the stuff that composes the work—think: the industrial measures of plywood or printing paper. The making of The Medium is the Massage elicits a reflection on how the ICA builds exhibitions, in terms of material resources, waste, and value. The exhibition’s insurance value is zero. 

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Curated by Sarah Rifky