Introduction

"Towards a culture of the quotation in a context of catastrophe" was the title of Enrique Vila-Matas’ chapter for TH.2058, a book designed like a science fiction novel that was the catalogue for Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 exhibition at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2008/09. In it Vila-Matas described that exhibition even before having seen it like this: “On every bunk there is at least one book, a book that has survived the humidity thanks to modern corrective treatments (...) ‘I‘m imagining,’ says the voice-over, ‘that the end of the summer has arrived and that I‘m going to London to see in the Turbine Hall what the city will be like in 2058.” In his novel Dublinesca, published after the exhibition, Vila-Matas also wrote about his visit to the Turbine Hall and about the exhibition’s relation to reference and quotation. TH.2058 and Dublinesca then explore timelines in which visitors travel both toward the future and toward the past.

Both the novel Dublinesca and the TH.2058 catalogue are now part of the exhibition Return to Noreturn. Not unlike Dorothy going back to the land of Oz in Walter Murch’s film, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster returns to Noreturn (2009), taking apart the film shot in the TH.2058. There, with a comprehensive installation in the main Turbine Hall, Gonzalez-Foerster presented a scenario in which humans and sculptures found shelter and protection from endless rains. The film referred to the earlier exhibition in London by depicting a raucous visit by a group of children in school uniforms who eventually fall asleep exhaustedly on the bunk beds. With this exhibition the artist returns to both the Noreturn and her exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Presented in more traditional exhibition formats such as painting, sculpture, text, sound and video, all works are elements and quotations taken from the earlier exhibition and film. The exhibition space is again transformed into a utopian environment at a future point in time.

In addition, Romilly (2012), a film presented here for the first time, isolates one of the characters from Noreturn, a little girl that like Dorothy embodies the children/cinema relation. The text piece Old Dream is generated from the subtitles of Noreturn. Its typographic design is by Marie Proyart and set in Bitstream Flareserif 821, a font inspired by Berthold Wolpe‘s Albertus (1938).

The text reads:

in this dream, it is endless