Director: David Hammons
Produced by Maumaus/Lumiar Cité
Portugal, USA
2001-2018
Runtime: 43’
SD Video, colour, sound

Inspired by 1920s French surrealists Ted Joans began the collective project Long Distance Exquisite Corpse in 1976. Folding a sheet of paper multiple times, participants would one by one create an image, leaving a line across the fold for the next author as starting point for their drawing to depart from. The resulting artworks often follow a humorous or violent logic. Tapping into surrealist notions of the unconscious, they contain a tension between the collaborative and the individual, intentionality and chance, drawing and object.

In 2001, David Hammons filmed Ted Joans unfolding the long artwork across the floor of the New York apartment of Robin D. G. Kelley and Diedra Harris-Kelley. Together with the artist Laura Corsiglia, they discuss each drawing and the creative and personal histories of the seemingly endless contributors. The camera follows the piece from fold to fold, emphasizing its physicality, the active process required to engage with it, the impossibility of viewing it in its entirety all at once. The artwork collapses into fragments but links its international participants, folding, unfolding, obscuring, revealing, connecting across great distances.