Para-siting: Clearance | Bring Your Own Book

Visit the exhibition Para-siting: Clearance until Sunday 20 April. Para-siting is a new ongoing programme running parallel to the exhibitions at W139.

Is looking back a necessity or merely disguised nostalgia? In an era saturated with images, references, and remakes, the urge to return—to reconsider and reinterpret—feels inevitable. But what do we hope to find?

What happens when three outsiders enter an institutional archive—a space built up, rearranged, and at times misappropriated? They ask questions, sometimes quietly, sometimes aloud: Who is this? Why do they keep this? They dig, select, document, and romanticise. Above all, they wonder: how does an archive, laden with its own relevance, make room for the new?

For three weeks, Bring Your Own Book presents Clearance at W139: an exhibition and auction in which selected ‘valuable’ pieces from the archive are displayed—and made available for purchase. Clearance is a temporary shift in ownership, a redistribution of institutional memory, and a circular experiment.

Para-siting is a new ongoing programme running parallel to our exhibitions. During Para-siting, W139 offers other organisms the space to take over: it becomes an environment for encounters and the exchange of ideas, enabling more agile and flexible responses to current or urgent developments.

Visual identity by Studio Buy My Talent.