Accompanying Marissa Lee Benedict, David Rueter, and Daniel de Paula’s exhibition in the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, deposition traces the artists’ exploration of the title’s multilayered meanings.

The artists’ efforts center on the salvage, displacement, and exhibition of a twentieth-century Chicago Board of Trade commodities futures trading pit, while the project’s many phases and continued evolution—as well as the artists’ interests in both public display and hidden processes—pose significant challenges to describing where the artwork begins and ends.

In addition to meticulous documentation of the project’s geological, legal, and art historical implications, essays and interviews provide various perspectives from which to view the ongoing endeavor. Ranging in style from personal to scholarly to conversational, the book’s diverse contributions scan the object itself, the many actors involved in the project, the function of the art institution at large, and the geopolitical landscape in which all these elements operate.

Contributors include Dan Peterman, Paulo Miyada, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Cameron Hu, Yamila Goldfarb, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Beatriz Cruz, and Vânia Medeiros.

Published by Mousse. Paperback, 352 pages. 170 color, 30 bw. 6 3/4 x 9 in.

Detail Artists’ documentation of the trading pit’s arrival in São Paulo.