Developed in collaboration with Isabella Brandalise
Showcased in barthesmonamour.com
We really must last a bit longer than our voices; we must, through the comedy of writing, inscribe ourselves somewhere.
Roland Barthes in From Speech to Writing
With his centennial as an excuse, we decided to honor Roland Barthes and his fixation with his writing instruments and processes. Two months of research led us to many fascinating details about Barthes’ writing and reading habits. An interview with him titled An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments* became our main source of information, but also extract interesting details from several of his books’ prefaces as well as his autobiography.
The objects fabricated for Controlled Accidents are reproductions of some of Roland Barthes’ writing instruments, re-created out of our interpretation and revisitation of these sources.
*"An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments" was initially published by Le Monde in 1963 and it can be found in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, published in English by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 1985.