Fia Backstrom: COOP: A-Script

COOP documents Swedish artist Fia Backström’s (born 1970) performances of two recent scripts, continuing her exploration of language, marketing, disorders and performance. The first script operates according to two distinct logics: a four-part linear base structure and text material that was chosen and read during the performance through chance movement of the performer’s body across a grid. This publication was especially designed to reflect this type of unpredictable and spontaneous movement. Mathematical symbols have been embedded into the text and these symbols link to ones on the upper corner of pages with nonlinear material. These indicate where the text could be inserted during a performance, thus incorporating the form of performance into the book. The second script serves as an epilogue to the first and was performed by four voices, reading from beginning to end without assigned lines, sometimes simultaneously.

Backström's writings, installations, and performances originate from her social context...and by adopting personas from an amateur to a bureaucrat, she fluidly challenges prevailing institutional power dynamics within communities of artists and intellectuals. Her new book COOP A-Script, which experiments with poetic language and its visual and physical manifestations, reminds us that reading is an irresolvable negotiation with the present. (Sam Korman Art in America)