N2H4, digital publishing house, pdf travel guides, writings, website, merchandisings, 2018

N2H4 is a publishing platform, editing and selling digital travel guides.

The website www.n2-h4.com is the main element of the project, gathering and selling personal writings about various cities.

The contributing authors are people with intimate knowledge of a place. They are invited to drawn up a text about how they live, what they discovered, what they liked or disliked, what was their relationship to the city. They are free to use the style and approach they prefer. On the contrary to classical travel guides made with local tourist offices, these texts are fully based on first hand experiences, creating autobiographical writings with a usable twist, delivering intimate visions of the places described.

These writings and their diffusion link N2H4 to the question of the protocal as a medium. Here each guides become a protocol that the reader-visitor-user can decide to follow (or not), to avoid (or not), to improve (or not). Even more than the question of the protocol, there is a link with the idea of performance, with a very specific approach : to guide a body from a place to an other one, from something to see to something to taste, unconsciously putting the reader on the path of the writer, making him replay the past and the memories of someone else. Here, the performance become directly implemented in reality and in the way of exploring a place, quoting at the same time “social-sculpture” and the psychogeography of the Situationnists.

The only physical existence of the project is through merchandising : pen, totebags, lighters… When the work is presented in an exhibition, these objects are made available and freely distributed during the show, applying viral communication process as any start-up would do.

N2H4 is generating situations, and becoming a catalyst for memories, using the writer’s own memory as its material while the reader create his/her own during his exploration. Isn't visiting a museum just an excuse to make a memory of it and living with it afterward ? It’s with the same spirit that N2H4 was created, leaving object-oriented art practice in order to get involved with reality and the mental construction that shapes it.