Gish Gallop Reverie
The installation consisted of a site-specific pixel drawing mural in my studio composed of 255 laser-printed A4 sheets applied with wheatpaste (480 × 342 cm). It also features 11 soapboxes made of oak and painted with acrylic, with variable dimensions. Daily reading performances took place from May 20 to 25, 2025. A publication accompanies the work: 1:1 Mural, Gish Gallop Reverie – Collected Writings, designed by Anton Westbom Weflö.
The Gish Gallop is a rhetorical technique that floods an opponent with excessive arguments, regardless of their merit. The soapbox, once a wooden crate for transporting goods, became a makeshift stage for public speech. Through the figure of the troubadour, Gish Gallop Reverie weaves together soapbox speeches, satirical labor ballads, and themes of love, chivalry, and unrequited devotion, scattered across fragmented narratives that blur the line between folklore and folk-fact. The mural, made of printed A4 sheets wheatpasted onto the wall, reveals faint figures across a panoramic field: tangled relationships and shifting interpretations, a comprehensive political cartoon, a medieval morality diagram, receding and appearing from the dark digital raster.
Daily reading performances during Rijksakademie open studios, May 20 to 25, 2025, variations of monologues and songs from the accompanying publication. Meanwhile, stepping between a series of soapboxes that in turn recite a perpetual bottomless love poem: Lovingly ⌢ glistening ⌢ glimpse ⌢ unconditional ⌢ ravishing ⌢ husk ⌢ lingering ⌢ languish ⌢ perpetual ⌢ quiver ⌢ pinched ⌢ (continuous and in no particular order).
