STUDIO 325

The long-awaited Address Book by Sophie Calle is finally published in English

I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs . . . I will contact the people whose names are noted down. I will tell them, “I found an address book on the street by chance. Your number was in it. I’d like to meet you.” . . . Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.

—from The Address Book by Sophie Calle

Based on an address book that French artist Sophie Calle found in the streets of Paris in the early 1980s, this controversial book has finally been released in English. Perhaps Calle's best known work is her 2007 Venice Biennale French Pavillion installation Please Take Care of Yourself, which has been exhibited worldwide. In 2009, Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective of her work.

Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals. Her written accounts of these encounters with friends, family and colleagues—juxtaposed with Calle’s photographs—originally appeared as serial in the newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983. When Pierre D., the original owner of the address book, learned about the work and its appearance in the newspaper, he threatened to sue. Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Now it has been almost thirty years since its original publication in France and it is ready for the first time in English.

Source: Siglio Press

Labels: Art, Books, France, Literature

Apologies for the neglect

I'm writing a couple of essays for my Masters, be back soon x

In the meantime, some writer's rooms of their own...

Roald Dahl

Dylan Thomas

George Bernard Shaw

Images

Labels: Books, Interiors, Literature

Alexis by Martin Jančok and Aleš Šedivec

Nowadays it is becoming increasingly hard for small independent bookshops to compete, not only with firmly established booksellers on the high street, but also with the advent of digital devices such as the kindle. This small bookshop in Bratislava by Slovakian architects Martin Jančok of Plural and Aleš Šedivec of Totalstudio aims to create a flexible space to both sell books and also to facilitate various events such as workshops and lectures. A stepped wooden platform allows people to sit and look at books, but in addition can be filled up with spectators for an impromtu auditorium.

Images: Plural

Labels: Architecture, Books, Design, Product Design

Artists and their Studios- in The Times Magazine today

An artist's studio is their only properly private space, keeping the depths of themselves a mystery to the outside work, until a work comes into the limelight and enters the public's domain. They can be fascinating spaces, accounting for years of unchecked creativity, and almost a work of art in their own right as they reveal so much about their owner. A new book, Sanctuary: Britain's Artists and Their Studios is to be released on the 12th March by Thames & Hudson, showing 120 of the country's artists in their workplaces. From Tracey Emin, to Grayson Perry and Lucian Freud, these photographs bring to light previously hidden and untouched interiors.

A quote taken from Cecile Debray's, Lucian Freud: the studio, published on the occasion of the exhibition: ‘Lucian Freud: l’atelier’; “Freud works the walls in a double sense: over the thirty years or so of occupying his top flat studio at 36 Holland Park (1977-2009), he deposited dabs and smears of excess paint on available walls, gradually creating deeply textured surfaces of accumulated, hardened paste; during the same period, these paint walls returned to Freud’s canvases in the form of renderings of themselves- paint representing paint, often surrounded by similar paint that represents flesh”.