Pedraglio’s second book with Book Works takes battles as a story-telling frame to focus on the small details and absurdities that characterize almost all of historical events and end up changing the course of their action. Mixed into the historical stories are personal accounts, trivial and idiosyncratic events that become elevated to the same status as those that affect history.
Each story comes with a drawing, a ‘potential stage’ for re-enacting the battle. Each story could be read as a script for a performance. Each performance could re-stage a battle, or simply a moment of everyday life that takes on, in that moment, the significance of a battle.
otherwise it would be too easy wouldn’t it? talking about the present moment through the anecdotal and instead no, it doesn’t work like that while instead you can talk about the real, that’s possible, yes or the real moment which I keep on imagining as a glitch in ones biography exposing the secret mechanics governing anyone’s life like, in the case of the incident I’d read in his book, the going out with a woman and the losing track of time and the ending up sleeping at hers and the getting involved in her domestic dynamics just enough to lose a train consequently ending up saving his own life… and that’s what I was telling to this new acquaintance of mine, now a friend while trying to explain to her what it was that I was doing with my writings the whole real moment thing