Roodkapje is Rotterdam’s local laboratory for
ART X MUSIC X FOOD and everything in between

Delftseplein 39
3013 AA Rotterdam

Visit exhibition
Tue-Sat 12:00 – 17:00

Roodkapje is Rotterdam's local laboratory for
ART X LIVE X FOOD and everything in between

10 April 2022 - 1 May 2022

EXHIBITION | Smudged Soil

Smudged Soil (Hamburger Community Exhibition)
with
Simon Keizer
Ratri Notosudirdjo
Lou Lou Sainsbury
Natalia Sorzano
Hasret Emine
Lucija Gregov
in collaboration with Dennis Muñoz Espadiña / Hocus Bogus Publishing

Kicking off the 2022 Hamburger Community Residency program, artist Dennis Muñoz Espadiña has led the new residents through a month-long-get-your-hands-dirty program to explore the materiality, performability and smudginess of RISO printing and small press publishing. Drawing inspiration from Helena Grande’s poetry pamphlet Night Soil, as well as the street-walk rubbings of artist Sari Dienes, the mentorship of Muñoz Espadiña has taken an unorthodox approach to the usual pre-press and computer editing process connected to digital stencil duplication.

Night Soil is an old euphemism for poop. A term that refers to how excrements were collected at night before the sewage system was created. At night, when everybody was sleeping, cleaners collected and transported human waste to hidden places. People woke up to a tidy city, except cleaners who were relegated to stay away from society because they were all night in touch with the collective dirt.

The mentorship is an experiment to build a bridge between the practice of printing and publishing, and these above-mentioned, hidden places where our collective waste is collected; giving leeway to the residents to explore and deconstruct the processes of printed matter through/with their bodies rather than their minds. As the title of this project conspicuously states: we favor dirty hands; scrunched up paper; broken nails; smudged fingertips; bruised arms; torn edges and sweat drenched clothes to save us from the tyranny of neatly stacked piles of crisp white paper.

Helena Grande is a writer, curator and translator currently based in New York City where she studies a MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Speech Choke (published by Hocus Bogus Publishing). Her stories have appeared in Fictional Journal and the anthology book DW Cities Amsterdam and her essays in A*Desk, nY and Research Catalog.

HOCUS BOGUS PUBLISHING
Hocus Bogus Publishing is a self publishing/distribution project initiated in 2015 by visual artist and zine lover Dennis Muñoz Espadiña. HBP is a merry mix of DIY Punk attitude and fine art aesthetics. Publications range from black and white zines; underground comix, to pamphlets and posters and micro artist editions. HBP aims to be a platform for showcasing and distributing the strange and wonderful aspects of printed matter.

Smudged Soil was made possible by VSB fonds, Stichting Bevordering van de Volkskracht, Stichting Job Dura fonds, Stichting Zabawas, Erasmusstichting, Elisabeth Mathilde Fonds, Maatschappij Nut van 't Algemeen en Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds