Inside the Bark of a Tree

Inside The Bark of a Tree marks the opening of If I Can’t Dance’s library to the public. The library is dedicated to performance art practices, histories and methodologies, and has grown in tandem with the artist commissions, research projects and fields of inquiries since the institution’s inception in 2005. Inside The Bark of a Tree proposes to see the library as a living topos that will continue to grow through textured encounters with its readers; it is a generative site of continuous cross-pollination that prompts moments of attention, of distraction, of discomfort, and of pleasure. The liveliness and materiality of the library is captured in the word’s proto-italic root, *lufro, referring to “the inner bark of trees” and *lubh-ro, meaning “leaf or rind”.
 
On display are works that together carve out an image of the library as dynamic and sensorial, and that is rigged with the potential for the reader to be lost or overwhelmed. The library is a space of searching, affect and desire, even while underscribed with a violence inherent in what is present and what is missing. Inside The Bark of a Tree situates the reader at the center of the library’s materiality, interpolating forms of readership and modes of attention that negate the distinction between the inside of the library and the quotidian ways in which we ‘read’ the material world and life around us.