Reading Architecture Symposium.

History and Theory Program, School of Architecture, McGill University, Benaki Museum,
Athens, 16.6.2015

Walking and Archiving: Locus Solus in Elephant and Castle.

Panos Kouros

The time of transmission is the only neutral ground of an artistic work.

The Living Archives. W. Borowski, A. Turowski, 1971

I will discuss a particular use of Raymond Roussel's novel Locus Solus in the context of Locus
Solus Public. Conversations Curatives [Talking Cure], a public intervention project performed
in Spring 2009 at Elephant and Castle,1 a conflicting inner London borough. Locus Solus has a
unique position in modern literature. It is a conceptual literary work, if I may thus describe its
dependence on the arbitrary process which produces the narrative. Narrative is a matter of
language and not perception. The novel does not tell us anything about place and urban
space. Its operative role in the project is based on its linguistic and performative, rather than
narrative space. What happens if we insert the novel, as performative device, in an urban
area under regeneration? How can it shift meanings and identities, when actively read and
manipulated in gentrifying public space? Locus Solus Public was part of a series of projects I
have realized, linking archive practice with public art. My argument is that the archiving
process, conceived as plural and performative, can be an intervention tactic in the public

1
Panos Kouros. “Locus Solus Public: Conversations Curatives”, performative archiving actions, Elephant
and Castle, 2009. Out of the Box Intermedia, London Festival of Europe. (Acting persons: Elena
Chronopoulou, Nora Demjaha, Giota Dimitropoulou, Athena Kokla).
sphere, shifting the emphasis from archival installation and the "ideology of the trace" to a
co-uttering situation and a production site.2 Archiving is thus conceived not merely as
documentation of a past event, but as an experimental process of public making, evolved in
the present, as a pause in the course of events, in order to question place, identities, actions.
The project intervenes in public and social spaces in Elephant and Castle using archival
practices and processes of documentation, drifting, translocal exchange of data. Elephant and
Castle has been the theatre of one of the most ambitious urban regeneration plans,
associated with "new urban colonialism" and the social cleansing of British city-centers. The
history of gentrification in the area symbolically started in 1997 with Tony Blair's speech in
Aylesbury Estate, the largest social housing estate in Europe. A rhetoric of devaluation of
Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle as "sink estate" and "hell estate" was used by the local
Council and the media3 to persuade the residents to accept the regeneration program,
followed by the progressive demolition of social housing blocks, and the eviction of tenants
and owners of flats. Locus Solus Public project took place during this transitional period of
emptying social housing estates from their inhabitants. During the course of the project (28.4-
1.5.2009), gathering activities and discussions were taking place in the streets, social spaces
and tenant meeting rooms, as well as real time generic archiving, either by the state/real
estate, or by activists and collectives, documenting the course of events as they were
happening.4

Plural archiving actions

Locus Solus is used as part of a complex strategy to unfold a collective space of archival
imagination, through (relational and translocal) public actions of reading, writing, and re-
writing. The archiving scenario involved two groups of acting persons, in-situ archivists and
remote writers, working in parallel and together via a wiki-archive, set up during the project.
Archivists recorded, transcribed, archived a double city/novel situation, and made the archive
public in public space, while its content was constantly reconfigured in real time by the
second group of remote writers. Writers from various places and backgrounds, with no direct
experience of the place, used the archive as base material for text production. Their
recensions were re-inscribed in place, making it an archive-public place for residents,

2
Panos Kouros. "The Public Art of Performative Archiving" in: Panos Kouros and Elpida Karaba, Archive
Public. Performing Archives in Public Art. Topical Interpositions. Patra: Cube Art Editions, 2012.
3
See: The Myths of Heygate Estate, in: https://elephantamenity.wordpress.com/archive/
4
See: http://www.elephantandcastle-lendlease.com, https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com,
https://elephantamenity.wordpress.com/archive
2
archivists, and writers.5 I will focus on the first part of the project, discussing the experimental
archiving actions, as they relate to Locus Solus.
During site-traversing, archivists are given the task to prepare a textual support-surface6
of the Elephant, using a common internet wiki as archival carrier. Each day, they move
without direction in pedestrian space, using streets, construction bypasses, building corridors,
blind alleys, etc. They are asked to record and archive various voices and co-utterings in public
space. They enter in rooms where tenant meetings take place, in gathering places inside La
Bodeguita shopping mall, in public laundries, autonomous spaces, parks or bus stops. They
initiate conversations at street intersections, or they set up conditions of confrontation
through spontaneous actions. The garage courtyard of one of the housing blocks of Aylesbury
Estate was used for such action. The same place was used as publishing and meeting locus for
the archiving works.
Elephant public utterings form a vast everyday archive. Not accumulating, but selecting
and sorting is the fundamental work in archival science.7 Let us consider a diagonal
documentation method, destabilizing the aesthetic perception of the archivist who collects
significant fragments in already determined categories. Featherstone noticed the ways
Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault used national libraries, by "reading seemingly haphazardly
'on the diagonal', across the whole range of arts and sciences, centuries and civilizations, so
that the unusual juxtapositions they arrived at summoned up new lines of thought and
possibilities to radically re-think and re-classify received wisdom."8 This is for Featherstone a
way of reading the archive, also linked to the movement of the flaneur, who attempts to
organize an archival reading of the city, based on insignificant fragments.9 In the context of
this project, documenting in the diagonal means unfolding unexpected actions and chance
encounters while moving, but also being attentive to insignificant utterings that resist a
thematic centre. Any idea of archival unity is fictional. Diagonal here refers to a certain
distraction in perception, which also became possible by the doubling of the archival field.
Introducing the space of the novel as a parallel to the city archival field was such gesture.
'Moving' in the novel shifted the way city archiving proceeded, and moving in the city shifted
the way reading paths were followed inside the novel.

5
This second part of the project was partly realized.
6
The function of the archival wiki surface can be compared to a minimalist work, in the sense of a
formalized system of reiterations and modifications. By using the term support/surface, I allude to the
specific art movement, and the idea of a performative manual intervention in rolled or unfolding
surfaces.
7
See Wolfgang Ernst, Underway to the Dual System. Classical Archives and/or Digital Memory. In: Net
Pioneers 1.0. Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art (ed. Dieter Daniels & Gunther Reisinger) Sternberg
Press, 2010.
8
Mike Featherstone, "Archive", Theory, Culture & Society, May 2006 23 (2-3), p. 594.
9
Ibid.
3
Archiving the novel
Archivists are asked to simultaneously read and document the place and the novel. Traversing
the space of the novel, producing archival entries: what is the space of the novel? How do we
document a novel? There is an apparent narrative space: Archivists walk in real space but
they also "move" inside the novel, while reading it; they mirror the group of invited guests in
the tour of Locus Solus Estate (the solitary place Estate). Roussel's guests walk in successive
loci of the Estate where marvelous mechanisms are described and explained in detail. At the
time of traversing, Elephant and Castle was still a place of diversity. Streets and the latino
shopping mall were public spaces with dense everyday encounters. Elephant 'guests'
interrupt their drifting when they enter such meeting places. Archiving works take place in
these loci. There is an evident analogy in the mnemotechnic function of both traversing
spaces. At a descriptive level, infra-ordinary everyday encounters in Elephant contrast the
extra-ordinary narrations in the secluded places of the estate of Locus Solus.
However, archiving works in the novel are not undertaken in this narrative space, but in a
multi-layered textual space, partly disclosed by Roussel, in his book Comment j'ai ecrit
certains de mes livres, published posthumously. Roussel described how narrative was
produced by an elaborate technique ("a very special method") of linguistic transformation,
cutting off any personal experience of events. He described two processes. The first begins
with two found identical words with double meanings:
"I chose two almost identical words. For example, billard [billiard table] and pillard
[plunderer]. To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining
two almost identical phrases. (...) The two phrases found, it was a case of writing a story
which could begin with the first and end with the latter."10
He then described a second variation of the evolutionary process, almost exclusively used
in Locus Solus: "...I was led to take a random phrase from which I drew images by distorting it,
a little as though it were a case of deriving them from the drawings of a rebus.11 The method
did make a reappearance in its original form with the word demoiselle considered in two
different senses; furthermore the second word itself underwent a distortion to link it up with
the evolutionary method:
1st. Demoiselle (young girl) à prétendant [suitor]; 2nd. demoiselle (pavior's beetle) à reître en
dents [soldier of fortune in teeth]."12

10
Raymond Roussel. How I Wrote Certain of My Books (ed. Trevor Winkfield). Exact Change: Cambridge
MA, 1995, p. 3-4.
11
Ibid. p. 12.
12
Ibid. p. 16.
4
 The word pretendent, or the word déluge does not appear in the novel. Roussel's
technique can be thought of as a process of continuous repetition and displacement.
Anything he heard or read by chance in his everyday movements, any found language, could
serve as initial material to be performed. We become aware of the existence of a hidden
network of banal everyday utterances, encountered by chance. He writes in Comment...:
“I used anything at hand. For instance, there was a well-known advertissement for some
apparatus called “Phonotypia”; this supplied me with “fausse note tibia” [wrong note tibia],
hence the Breton, Legloualch.
I even utilized the name and address of my shoemaker: 'Hellstern, 5, place Vendome,' gave
me 'Hélice tourne zinc plat se rend (devient) dôme' [Propeller turns zinc flat goes (becomes)
dome]."13
The narrative is thus the outcome of the performative linguistic machine. Roussel's
project is at the same time the textual production and the product-text. The post-humous
meta-discourse of Comment... has a principal conceptual role in the reading of Locus Solus. It
really transfers the performative dimension from the process of writing to the act of reading:
The reader reads the narrative as an archaeological fantasy linking various ruins. Each word
becomes, thus, the echo of an absent past layer of association of elements. This underlying
network of affinities, is not only analogous "on an intellectual level, to rhymes", as Leiris
noticed,14 but also defines a resonant void space where words seem to belong and which the
reader is seeking. Foucault has exactly described the space of the novel as an empty space,
"prepared inside language, which opens in the interior of the word this insidious, deserted
and trap-like emptiness."15
During their traversing, archivists know that Roussel, in his Comment... book, archived
certain fragments as paradigms of his hidden method. Other traces are discovered by
Roussel's commentators: for example, Ferry, as Trevor Winkfield noted, found key words
"which set in motion an entire "suggestive chain", that kind of orderly stream of
consciousness of which billard-queue-chiffre-bandes-reprises-blanc-colle is the prime
example".16 Archivists also know that Locus Solus is a vast visible array of detourned traces of
actuality, readings, scientific theories, urban actualities, fait divers, spectacles and political

13
Ibid. p. 13-14.
14
Michel Leiris, "How I Wrote Certain of My Books" in: Michel Leiris, Brisees: Broken Brunches, North
Point Press: San Fransisco, 1989, p. 52.
15
"Roussel's experiment is located in what could be called the "tropological space" of the vocabulary.
It's not quite the grammarian's space, or rather it is this same space, but treated differently. It is not
where the canonical figures of speech originate, but that empty space, prepared inside language, which
opens in the interior of the word this insidious, deserted and trap-like emptiness." [my translation in
italics]. Foucault. The Death and the Labyrinth. The world of Raymond Roussel. London New York:
Continuum, p.18.
16
Raymond Roussel. Ibid., p. 31.
5
events. "These encyclopedic fragments come in the inside of the book in an often perverse
way: the allusions are rarely simple and direct, but mostly detourned."17 The archivists'
archival task is not so much to multiply such cases, verifying Roussel's construction method. It
is rather to extract, to excavate, to document what they assume are traces of this resonant
empty space, without referring to the specific missing language. If the "phonetic fragments of
this first language, sparkling, without our knowing where (...) are displayed in the enchanted
surface", as Foucault eloquently writes,18 the archiving task is to correspond to such signifiers.
Archiving is a conjectural work. Using continuous cutting acts, archivists disassociate signifiers
from their narrative context, archiving them for their conjectural possibilities.

Archival desistence
During their walks, archivists used a slightly modified, ready-made wiki to place the Elephant
and Locus Solus findings. The relative position of fragments is not fixed. This is an archival
surface which keeps elemental metadata and a non-hierarchical structure; it is a
"metaphorical" archival structure19, which resembles the act of disassembling an archive in
order to carry it. Archivists bring fragments of two extraneous spaces in proximity. Resonant
signifiers of a missing language from the a-temporal Locus Solus spaces are juxtaposed to
insignificant utterings in Elephant's social spaces. Locus Solus centrifugal fragments de-
contextualize Elephant utterings. In this way, the wiki functions as a neutral archival support-
surface,20 open to reiterations.
The wiki function does not separate storage from use. The initially constructed topology
of fragments is reconfigured again and again by the writers. Any re-writing trope21 may be
used for any archival content. New archival recensions are produced by this polyphonic (and

17
Patrick Besnier, Pierre Bazantay, Petit Dictionnaire de Locus Solus. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993, p. 18.
18
Michel Foucault.The Death and the Labyrinth. The world of Raymond Roussel. London New York:
Continuum. p. 45.
literal ‘metaphorization’ of the archive
19
Wolfgang Ernst uses the term literal ‘metaphorization’ of the archive, to refer to the transfer
operations of the archive, in a media archaeology perspective (see: "The Archive as Metaphor. From
Archival Space to Archival Time". Open 7, 2004, p. 46-53.) Here, I refer to a minimal archival
infrastructure, allowing multiple, unpredictable arrangements. See: Panos Kouros. Adopting the Archive
of Contemporary Greek Art Institute in: Sharing our methods, work and experience on public art and
architecture @ Arch_06 Lab, Microgeographies @ Storefrontnyc, 26.9 – 21.11, 2014, and Panos
Kouros. Desistence of living archives. Key note lecture, Symposium Archive Public II, 4th Biennale of
Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. 2013.
20
On the notion of archival desistence as an organized neutral zone for performative archival action,
see: Panos Kouros. Desistence of Living Archives. Keynote lecture, Symposium Archive Public II,
Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2013.
21
Specific devices were provided in the wiki platform as writing-aid for the writers. Locus Solus
Mnemeden was such a writing mechanism, specifically modified from an earlier version of Mnemeden
project. See: Panos Kouros, Mnemeden: a Net.performance of Mnemonic Conceptions. Sky Art
Conference 2002. l. Knot and B. Kracke, eds., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for
Advanced Visual Studies, p. 186-189.
6
antagonistic) public performance. An archive public gathers in the Aylesbury Estate individual
garage doors, where copies of archiving recensions are attached.22 People meet in this open
archive place. Elephant utterings become important for their generative, transformative
potential, and not for their preservation in a culture of documents. The only remaining
resident in Aylesbury had to be forcibly evicted from his home in 2013. Paradoxically, the
condensed time of the archival performance is a slow-down in the stream of events during an
effective regeneration process.23 Archiving can be seen as an act of desistence.

22
The same location was used by archivists as a Locus Solus reading space, initiating discussions in front
of each resident's garage space, as part of the collecting acts. Locus Solus first appeared in a
fragmented form, as a serial (feuilleton) in Gaulois du Dimanche, with the title: Quelques heures a
Bougival. "It passed completely unremarked", Roussel wrote in Comment...
23
For the recent evictions, occupation events and fencing-in of residents in Aylesbury Estate blocks,
see: https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/aylesbury-estate-is-everyones-fight/ and
https://fightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/what-next-on-the-aylesbury-article-from-
southwark-notes/ [accessed May 2015]
7