How was your Easter vacation? I hope that with a bit of luck you can still feel the aftertaste of getting lost in nature, of staying in bed reading when you wake up, of the long dinner meals, of the good naps afterwards.... Maybe you feel them far already, but there is always something to celebrate. From now on, whoever wishes to do so will not need to wear a mask when visiting this room. What a joy! And there's more good news, because it rained cats and dogs and we've just printed a special edition. This is spring: it's raining and it's sunny, suddenly I'm shyly wearing short sleeves, suddenly I'm wearing my coat again.
Those of us who are dedicated to books, among other things, always have on the list of questions that do not need to be answered if it will rain on Sant Jordi. Because whether it dawns clear or it pours, tomorrow we celebrate the International Book Day as dear as it is always on April 23rd. I remember now that in that strange month of 2020, I felt like a fugitive clinging to a shopping cart full of packages when I went to the post office in full confinement so that no one would be left without an artist book as part of our annual program of affordable collecting.
This Saturday we will have a beautiful display of publications by in-house artists, as well as our traditional white garden roses wrapped in poems and, for this occasion, the exclusive collector's edition that we have published with Louis Porter, printed in part with the lovely people from L'Automàtica. Below, find more about this fascinating project and some other stories of the future.
👉 Please, read here Louis Porter's explanation on the special edition he thought for our collectors:
"A found bookmark" is a facsimile edition of a bookmark and the pages it was discovered between at The London Library. Since 2014 I have used the London Library - one of the world's largest subscription libraries - as a site for artistic research, contemplation and production. Almost one million books are housed on open access shelves organised alphabetically by subject, allowing for a form of literary Dérive.
During my wanderings I occasionally encounter a bookmark, most are simple scraps of paper with little or nothing on them. Occasionally, one will reveal something about a previous reader: a receipt for a meal a ticket stub, a list of items to be purchased or tasks to perform. Rarer still are those which form little bridges between myself, the book and this unknown reader and for a moment, on discovering the bookmark, I feel in a way I know this person.
These ones I keep.
This edition produced for and with Chiquita Room is an attempt to share that moment of connection. This particular bookmark was found in a copy of The New Theories of Matter and the Atom by Alfred Berthoud under Chemistry, inside the densely packed shelves of the Science and Miscellaneous section. On a sheet of paper carefully removed from a lined notebook, a reader has neatly written - beginning with Avogadro's number - a series of aide memoire on the fundamentals of matter. This marker represents then a point of departure, but its presence between the pages of the book suggest the reader's journey - though begun in earnest - may have been short lived and in that it also indicates a journey's end. The tenacious desire to turn to books, to leave them unfinished, unread or misunderstood, is an act that has no digital correlate. No amount of unread PDFs or hastily bookmarked websites for self-enlightenment can simulate the intimacy of a fleeting encounter with a book. These digital surrogates are hollow performances, unrequited loves or furtive glances.
A bookmark not only indicates a place in a book, it represents a pause, the moment when the connection between a book and its reader was broken. The conditions of this suspension are unknown, but its intimacy lingers.
Come by tomorrow to discover it in the presence of Louis or, if you can't, you have the opportunity to subscribe here to receive it at home.
👉 One of those things that happen in the life of encounters and coincidences and networks and friends is that suddenly you arrive at a place where you had already been, but it is elsewhere and a new door opens. From a search on the Internet (thanks for sharing, Yas), I remembered the article I wrote almost ten years ago about the photographer Alba Yruela for "it magazine. To close the chapter of her visual notes of a decade, Diaris 2009 - 2019 will be seen here during the first week of May. At the crossroads between biographical collection and work with shapes, colors and light, Alba brings together more than 500 photographs taken during those 10 years. A work edited on her personal archive, which as an accumulation of images invades for four days the walls of the gallery so that you, dear people, choose and take the photo you want to incorporate into your collection, your own personal archive, in exchange for 5 euros.
As a closure of a period and colophon of the book she launched in 2021, designed by Gemma Penya and published by Terranova, Alba brings us together around the copies that were part of that process. These visual instants collected over the course of a decade combine the sensitivity and strength of seeing them all together in one space, where you can feel the vivid passage of time in the free play of seeing some images next to others.
👉 After the farewell, we will welcome the Maisons de weekends imaginaires by Laía Argüelles Folch. A project that I am looking forward to and that arises as a response to the interest in private spaces and the desire for home as a sometimes unattainable notion. This exquisite work subtly addresses the difficulties of the desire to belong to a space that can be called one's own. A number of things and people will be involved around the exhibition and I will write to you in depth about it all in the near future.
🌂 For today I thank you for reading, as this letter is long, and I say goodbye with the poem "Roses" by my favorite, Mary Oliver, so appropriate for what is to come.
Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answer: first cause, God’s existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing
not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning.
“Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”
they said. “But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses.”
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