Footnotes from History: the Debord Variations is based on a late essay by Guy Debord in which he revises and extends some of the ideas he developed in his seminal treatise ‘The Society of the Spectacle’. In a series of poetic fragments and quotations Campbell Robinson improvises with Debord’s themes as revealed in the footnotes to this essay. Political assassination and word death; the revolution of the everyday and the failure to realise the utopian dreams of the 60s; the breakdown of solidarity and the threat of terrorisms in people’s daily lives are among the subjects Campbell Robinson touches upon. However, at no point does the piece become proscriptive or didactic, maintaining throughout the possibility of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’.

Footnotes follows on from Campbell Robinson’s earlier texts collected in Blue Solitude, also issued by Knives Forks Spoons Press, by employing a combination of non-illustrative photos taken by the author and a calligraphic text layout. In this respect the text reflects the montage techniques employed by Guy Debord in his seven groundbreaking films made between 1952 and 1994.