Latitudes, and the Economy of the Booth
A fair is a spatial argument about value. Six days in Johannesburg, reading the floor plan as a text.
The floor plan arrives three months before the fair does. By the time anyone walks in, the argument has already been made: who is near the entrance, who is near the bathrooms, whose walls face outward and whose face a corner.
I want to take that plan seriously as a piece of writing. Not metaphorically. Literally: a document that makes claims about value, distributes attention, and is edited by people with a stake in the outcome.
A fair is a spatial argument about value, and the booth is its sentence.
What interests me is how rarely we read it that way. We review the works. We review, occasionally, the curation. We almost never review the plan, which is the only part of a fair that everybody experiences identically and nobody experiences consciously.
Six days in, I stopped looking at what was on the walls and started counting how long people stood in front of them. The numbers were not flattering to anyone, including me.
Narelle Writer.