Conversations curatives (talking cure) is a found phrase in Raymond Roussel’s novel Solus-Locus. Conversations Curatives. Locus Solus Public is a performative archiving action producing a shifting space of proximity between acting persons, Roussel’s novel, and Elephant & Castle, an inner London borough, undergoing rapid gentrification. The project took place during this transitional period of emptying social housing estates from their inhabitants. It used a complex strategy to unfold a collective space of archival imagination, through (relational and translocal) public archiving actions. The archiving scenario involved two group of acting persons (operators and scribers) working in parallel via a wiki support-surface. Operators recorded and transcribed a double city/ novel situation, and made the archive public in public space, while its content was simultaneously reconfigured by the second group of remote writers. The performed archival instances were re-introduced in public space, attached in specific places of the housing estates, making them an archive-public place for residents and acting persons. Conversations Curatives turned Roussel’s writing mechanisms into a collective wiki-device for a public mnemotechnic: a locus-solus-public, activated by unpredictable, asynchronous, parallel voices.

Talking Cure. Dialogic Archiving as Performative Urban Practice.

Panos Kouros

Atlantis, March 2017

Walking and Archiving: Locus Solus in Elephant and Castle.

Panos Kouros