Symphony as Surrogate

“To imagine the draaiorgel and the modern CBD as a mismatched couple is easy. What is perhaps less easy to imagine is the actual scenario – passers by dressed in suits, commuter traffic/yuppies on their way to half-empty buildings. In their midst stands Zefi cranking a cast-iron wheel that produces strange long tones, intersected by shorter tones. Sound devoid of true musicality, perhaps something more like sonic shapes, thrown back at the architectural shapes from which they were derived – archaic and primitive.”
(Excerpt from Symphony as Surrogate; text written by James Beckett, published 2010 by the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ)

The Publications Project is a collection of artist books issued by the Dutch Art Institute and designed in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie.