Ken Lum & Hubert Damisch | Ultimo Bagaglio

Ken Lum & Hubert Damisch
Ultimo Bagaglio
Paris, France: Three Star Books, 2008
33.5 x 28 x 7.5 cm
Edition of 15 signed and numbered copies

Hubert Damisch (1928 – 2017) was a French philosopher and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1975 until 1996. His analysis of images has spanned from art, to architecture, to film, and the museum itself. This collaboration with Vancouver artist Ken Lum consists of a box containing an essay, an instruction leaflet, a hotel pen, a single sock, a miniature Eiffel Tower, a dictionary, a small mirror, a nail clipper, a black stone, a small lock, a key, a bamboo object, a DVD, a Vancouver bus ticket, sheet of music, and four passport photos.



"Artist Ken Lum and writer Hubert Damisch change roles and swap ideas in this 21st century update of the Duchampian boite en valise. The object, a book and suitcase, contains a meditation on traveling and memory by Damisch, and a selection of objects suggested by Ken Lum, and sourced in Europe and North America. Traveling, writing, thought, and the storing of memory are alluded to in what appears like a surgeon’s kit. The Roman writer Cicero once suggested locating the points of an orated speech around different objects remembered in a room, in his famous text on the art of rhetoric. In the hands of Lum and Damisch, the difference between objects and writing is elided, much in the way that their symbiotic artistic collaboration has united historically opposed professions."

- publisher's statement