Jacques Derrida writes that “[t]he ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system, and architectonics.”³ In a recent text in Ixiptla, a research journal edited by Mariana Castillo Deball, she writes that the forum of ancient Greek society is both a physical space and the people who gather in it.⁴ Something similar can be said about the tower of Babel. It is both architecture and the materialization of a monolithic language, or what such language strives to achieve: the utopian project of absolute (heavenly) knowledge, which is bound to fail. And Babel, as Derrida points out, is also the failure itself, which signifies the event in its trace. Babel in ruins. This failure is told through the scattering of people in different directions “upon the face of the whole earth”, and this scattering also finds its visual echo in the works shown in this exhibition. 

Why am I interested in moulds and positives and negatives and papier-mâché in the context of As Hardly Found? It has a lot to do with the materiality of things; also, with transforming the skin of the archive into something else. That surface is almost a leftover, and has a different way of expressing itself: it’s a bit clumsier. It seems to me that As Hardly Found is interested not in the contents of the archive itself but the people and the work on its peripheries. The power of the copy, of repetition and of the transformation of original sources is also significant and potentially dangerous in the global south. It was difficult to try to work with the darker, technical violence that took place as DTS architects went to teach people living in other countries how they should make their buildings. I wanted to find a new space within the dryness and hardness of the solutions they were proposing and the materials they advocated for. Paper pulp is soft and humble, contrasting with the permanence of architectural materials like concrete and wood – if you put one of my pieces in water for half an hour, it would completely dissolve. That impermanence was important to me. Also, a sense of humour, and the idea that things don’t need to be perfect – you just do it because you want to do it, even if you don’t have access to the original, even if you were not there. Who has access to these archives? Very few people. That was also something I was thinking about while working on this exhibition.

It took me a while to understand the archive of the Department of Tropical Studies. When I came to visit the AA in summer 2022 with Ed Bottoms, Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, Manijeh Verghese, and Harriet Jennings we spent time exploring the archive opening and closing boxes, and there was a moment of revelation when we saw where things are stored, containing hundreds of papers and reports. There was a distinction between the archival boxes and the content itself, which was often very dry and difficult to digest, and rather problematic at times. Somehow, I preferred to stay on the soft surface – the skin of things was more appealing to me than the actual reports, diagrams and analysis.

All the boxes in the archive are made with a distinctive type of green cardboard, and I started to imagine how I might use this material and transform it into something else. We got in touch with the paper company, Conservation by Design, that produces these boxes for many different archives in the UK. I asked them if I could have bits and pieces of their leftovers, and they sent a parcel with about 30kg of paper scraps which I then brought back to my studio in Berlin.

I often work with paper and papier-mâché, but here I used a technique I had never tried before: using the leftover material make a pulp. Then, I made a series of plaster moulds based on some materials that appealed me from the archive. One is a poster for Action Planning that the director of the Department of Tropical Studies commissioned (Figure 1), with a drawing at the top that looks like an abstract expressionist painting and a very modernist typeface at the bottom. It's so condensed and so brutal in a way, but when I transformed it into papier-mâché it became something else, somehow collapsing to become very soft. I made another piece based on a magazine that was featured in the exhibition (Figure 2),[1] with a kind of verna window and a tree on the front; behind, in a different layer, is the title of the magazine.

Carved between 1300 and 1500, the Coatlicue is commonly referred to as a representation of an earth goddess, which had a turbulent story both as a mythological figure and also in the way it was excavated in Mexico city in the 18th century. The statue of Coatlicue was discovered and later displayed in the main plaza of Mexico City in 1790. It was one of the fist objects, which was not destroyed by the Spaniards. The indigenous population began to worship it, to prevent this, the statue was buried again in a courtyard of the University where it could not be seen. The statue was dug up in 1803, so that Alexander von Humboldt could make drawings and a cast, as well as the collector William bullock who made another cast, which was displayed in the Egyptian Hall in London, as part of Bullock’s ancient Mexico exhibition. The monumental stone original sculpture is on display at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico city.

In Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye words: “While the Coatlicue was a significant object of veneration for Indigenous people in both pre- and post-contact Mexico, its status as an archaeological specimen and sculpture only came into prominence through two- and three-dimensional copies. This was particularly true when it lay underground, as the copies were the only way of visually accessing the sculpture. After its final disinterment and subsequent display, the Coatlicue became almost hypervisible, appearing at world’s fairs and museums around the world, as well as being reconfigured in paintings, murals and sculptures. This visibility of the sculpture through its copies secured its position in the canon of pre-Columbian art. One significant outcome of the massive proliferation of the Coatlicue and other pre-Columbian objects was that modern and contemporary Mexican artists began to think more critically about the role of the pre-Columbian past in their own identity.”1

1. Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye , Circulating casts of the Coatlicue: Mariana Castillo Deball’s unearthing of the Aztec earth goddess’s history of reproduction and display. Sculpture Journal, Volume 28, Number 3, 2019

During the summer of 2022 I worked together with the paper producers Gangolf Ulbricht and Ulrich Kühle at Keystone editions printing workshop in Berlin, developing a new series of 30 unique prints, for the exhibition Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
It was a very interesting process with different steps in which I printed the motives in blue, red and yellow, on three different papers developed by Gangolf Ulbricht.
Once these prints were ready, I ripped them apart into small pieces, and blended them into tiny particles. These crushed prints were added into paper pulp during the making of new sheets. Afterwards I returned to keystone editions, and we printed on top of the new paper sheets. The series of images I developed exist in a transition zone between a completed image and a deconstructed one, an archeological dig and a puzzle.

Essay: 
The Ceremony Can(Not) Be Found in the Serpent(ine)
Zairong Xiang