Passagen-Arbeit

The publication brings together an overview of Patrizia Bach's longstanding engagement with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project: a bundle of notes spanning 4000 pages that Benjamin collected together during his years in exile in Paris, constructed in Bibliothèque nationale, between 1927 until his death in 1940. Ever since the artist set eyes on the manuscripts in the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin for the first time in 2012, she could not relinquish herself from their unique qualities. The meticulously executed pages and their countless coloured markings appeared to contain meanings otherwise lost in the subsequent editions of the published work. Emanating from a graphic interaction with the work, a number of projects emerged.