This series of site-specific and durational performances involved the burning of individuals’ names from three books that had served as a means for staff communication within an emergency winter nightshelter for homeless people. The nightshelter (managed by Kirsten Lavers) had operated during the winter of 97/98 in a redundant victorian library. Before this unique social document could become available for public reading the confidentiality of the people named in the text had to be addressed. To burn a hole in one side of a double-sided notebook, necessarily creates bizarre erasures on the other side. As such the disruption of the surface logics of the text acquired both new urgencies and losses. As each name was burnt away the people whose confidentiality was being honoured were fictionalised - judge, company director, truck driver, lucky winner, youngest son - and inserted into a live and recorded reading of the book. Process and product plugged into each other at every stage of the 5 day long performances unravelling towards the gestural closure of perfect binding.

pyr(rh)ic solution # book two was performed at the Boots Library, Nottingham November 1998