Op Leven En Dood is an experimental book that documents the experience and feeling of walking the meandering streets of Prague over the course of a week, through collaged instant film, ephemera, and partially torn broadsides from the streets.
Polaroid images were taken and broadsides were torn from the walls of Prague and stuffed into a backpack while walking the streets during a one week stay in the city. A vintage hardback of Op Leven En Dood, by Anna Blaman, was acquired at a used bookstore in Prague at the end of the trip. Once home, the hardback was disassembled into loose leaf sections whereby the polaroids, collected ephemera, and broadside fragments were collaged together to create an experimental book which documents the abstract feeling and nature of meandering the streets of Prague.
Leading up to Op Leven En Dood, art practice focused on experimental book-making using polaroid film, found objects, and alternative binding techniques. An example book from this period used stuffy, esoteric art theory texts applied to cotton paper with Lettraset and juxtaposed with attached, semi-erotic polaroids of a contemporaneous lover. Op Leven En Dood led to another project called Dawn which was an experimental book documenting the flora and fauna along the trail to Dawn Mine, in Altadena, CA. Polaroids were mounted to a long strip of canvas to create cascading "pages", bound to dilapidated, rusted steel pipe fragments as front and back covers. The steel covers were appropriated from antique Dawn Mine water pipes found along the trail.
Op Leven En Dood was influenced by ideas and acts of psychogeography and the dèrive in Situationist International and Lettrist International texts, as well as Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life. Ideas developed from these texts and practices organically evolved into the ADD project.