Appendix Project

On the ongoing project of writing about grief; Zambreno's addendum to Book of Mutter.

‘I came up with the idea of writing these notes, or talks, out of a primary desire to not read from Book of Mutter, and instead to keep gesturing to its incompleteness and ongoingness, which connects, for me, to the fragmentary project of literature, and what I long for in writing.’
―from Appendix Project

Beginning on March 16, 2017, the fifteenth anniversary of her mother's death, Kate Zambreno gave a series of talks on and around the material in her Book of Mutter, which had just been published. Book of Mutter, a tender, disquieting meditation on the capacity of writing, photography, and memory to embrace the shadows while in the throes of grief, was composed over thirteen years. Many things Zambreno explored in the process of writing that book were left out. In Appendix Project, which was written much faster, during the first year of her daughter's life and in a state of exhausted “aphasic openness,” she picks up these threads.

Everything, in this state, is at once blurred and frozen in time. It's no coincidence that Appendix Project begins with a brilliant consideration of On Kawara's Today Series of 3,000 paintings that bear only the date. Investigating the ongoing project of writing about grief, Zambreno considers the nature of time, memory, the maternal, and death over the course of her daily life, and through her readings of other writers and artists. In Appendix Project, she comes close to the heart of writing itself.