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Word-Covenant
Ori Drumer

Kobi Franco’s artist’s book, Molecular Typography Laboratory, is an experimental typographical journey. It explores the practice of typography using a fictional-scientific method, applying it to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet by means of conceptual frameworks such as function versus aesthetics, or content versus form. This fictional-scientific study positions Franco as an experimental artist, who seeks to expand the limits of his practice and to explore complex challenges, in the spirit of avant-­garde movements such as Dada, Lettrism in France, or the Beat movement in the United States. In the spirit of artists such as William Borroughs and Brion Gysin, who wrote surrealistically inflected novels in order to reveal the hidden agendas underlying technological and political processes in the 20th century, Franco’s experimental work can be seen as an attempt to expose the typographical unconscious.

 

This exploration, which centers on the practice of the researcher himself and the deconstruction of its building blocks, is revealed to be a personal study of the body, of being and identity, and of the relations between subject and other, in which letters function as an extension of the researcher’s body. The artist’s book and the accompanying research project provoke further thought, curiosity, and imagination, and their exploration is accompanied by a desire to decipher and name the letter images functioning as body parts.

Ori Drumer is a curator, cultural critic, artist, musician, and trained psychotherapist. He is an interdisciplinary fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Drumer was the founder of the band Duralex Sedlex, and has composed music for dance performances, the theater and cinema. His work as an artist has been showcased at numerous venues, and he has curated exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Drumer founded and directed the Interdisciplinary Art Department at the Musrara School in Jerusalem, and has authored research publications on alternative Israeli art.

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