Appropriated Mishap (2014) is a 13-minute animated collage for projection with live reading and quotations from La Poubelle Agréée by (1975) Italo Calvino.

Appropriated Mishap (2018) is an extended 22-minute animated collage with new live reading and quotations from La Poubelle Agréée by (1975) Italo Calvino.

La Poubelle Agréée (1974-76), is reprinted in This Mess is a Place (ed. Mendelson, 2013), and is Calvino’s typically elegant essay on the complexities of waste management from his Paris home and into the world beyond.

In this animation, Calvino’s text is mis-used as a vehicle for its own destruction. The piece was made in response to having 750 misprints to destroy after having included Calvino’s essay in an edited book.

Several months after publication, Mendelson returned to the appropriateness of this waste product from Calvino’s work and began to consider ways she could get rid of the pages. Proposing ways in which the text could be expelled, transported and afforded new status as a container for food or drink (‘food for… reading’) towards its own ingestion, she set up various possibilities for its demise. Using stop-frame animation, collage and lingering photographic stills of collaged domestic spaces, Mendelson played with regurgitated versions of the text in both form and content. The ‘character’ charged with the task of disposing of La Poubelle Agréée was a surrogate for the artist: An animalistic (and self-reproducing) counterpart, made of her own hair.

There are now two versions of this animation (the first performed at Artsadmin, London in Feb 2014; the second at Griffin Gallery in Jan 2018 and the Science Museum, London in May 2018). The first includes a live reading of clunky extracts from a banal out-of-print guide to waste management, also from the ‘seventies. The second includes a semi-fictitious lecture by Mendelson on waste and hoards.

Events/screenings:
Feb 2014: A Slip of Freuds: 
An evening of collective nouns and clutter, Artsadmin, London. ‘Zoë Mendelson curates and presents an evening dedicated to objects en masse and coagulated’