DEAR MR. JUNG
Meta-critique, Hand-bound leather folio
April-October 2018
Urban Story-telling, Bloomsbury Festival, 2018, London
Project initiated & led by / Ishita Jain
Made as part of Site-Writing module on the Architectural History program at The Bartlett School of Architecture.
Dear Mr Jung is a mythical site manifesting as a book. It is a mytho-poetically constructed space of an epic, recapturing the landscape generated internally in the reader as she performed the task of reading The Red Book. The reader time-travels across historical, mythical and personal times, all inter-woven in her dialogues with the author of the book, Carl Jung. This dialogue is carried out through a series of letters she writes to him in his dreams, transcribed in wakening consciousness. These letters become sites of record and reflection of the parallel streams of time and layers of pages that manifest through the act of reading The Red Book.
This book is a constructed condensation of one of the many ways to read Carl Jung’s The Red Book. The drawings in this book are a record of the pace of The Red Book and how it transformed within different subjectivities. Longer dialogues have yielded a more elaborate manifestation – recording the extension of that moment, and the tension in the body as it transformed. The “eye” looks inwards and outwards simultaneously and the various subjective states that have been activated in the book and in the reader are made explicit.
Produced as a manuscript bound in a leather folio, Dear Mr Jung is also a meta-critique, addressing the methods of producing works of this order. The project began within the Site-Writing module as part of the MA Architectural History course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London. It attempts to situate The Red Book as both a historical and iterative site of more works to come.
