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Institute of Chance, 2004
Silkscreen posters, digital print
Exhibition copies
Courtesy of the artist

Chance—a product of the passing of time, erosion, fragmentation and human intervention—largely determines the way in which we learn to describe the world and the stories we tell about it. Chance has played an important role in the work of Castillo Deball, who has used it as a methodology to approach objects that have been marginalized within historic and ethnographic collections. In Institute of Chance, the artist suggests we infiltrate institutions to find those spaces where ephemeral, marginal or useless material is accumulated, resisting the encyclopedic ambition to classify everything.

In 2004, the artist worked at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where she found the most important archive of anarchist documents in Europe. The paradox of seeing so much anarchy organized and archived called her attention, but even still, she found an unidentified, uncatalogued series of photographs. Castillo Deball randomly distributed copies of these images to people in Amsterdam, each one receiving a different collection, a partial but unique series, accompanied by a lottery ticket and a letter written by a fictitious anarchist named Jan Huygens. Through this project, Institute of Chance takes advantage of the discursive potential of the fragments and residues of classification mechanisms while refusing to control their becoming.

go to The Wall and The Books: 987 Words Stolen from a Library