An Artist Book
I have been invited to participate in an exhibition of artist books with the title doppio senso/ Dual meaning. We were asked to work with a book of our choice, a printed book and to with our intervention to amplify, enlarge or deconstruct the sense of the text it containes.
Thirst (Sete) di Jo Nesbo è il libro che ho scelto.
Per il modo che ho di lavorare, scegliere è in effetti un termine impreciso: le mie “scelte” sono sempre un misto di casualità e di deliberato intervento sul caso. Così è stato anche questa volta: all’invito di Simonetta mi sono guardata intorno e il libro di Nesbo, un autore che leggo quasi esclusivamente quando sono in viaggio, era lì, davanti a me. Pronto per essere “lavorato”.
In questo caso, il lavoro che ho subito immaginato era un doppio senso non come “senso sottostante” e “altro” ma come amplificazione del senso del libro.
Senza richiamare la trama del racconto, dirò solo che si tratta di un Nesbo, già di norma molto “gotico”, in piena deriva splatter, in cui ogni personaggio è portatore di una passione malata che contempla la morte come possibile via d’uscita.
Ecco, mi sono detta: farò un intervento col fuoco e con il filo. Col fuoco ho bruciato il libro in più parti, creando fori e lacerazioni , come le ossessioni portate alle loro estreme conseguenze lasciano nel racconto corpi feriti e anime devastate.
Col filo rosso il libro l’ho attraversato, “raddoppiandolo” come trama, pista di segni e, ovviamente, cucitura. Come fra i personaggi di Nesbo, che cercano inutilmente di ricucire le proprie ferite facendo esplodere le pulsioni più indicibili, i miei fili “legano” le pagine senza un ordine o un esito prestabiliti. E qualsiasi soluzione non può essere che provvisoria.
THIRST (SETE) by Jo Nesbo is the book I have chosen.
For the way I work, “to choose” is in fact an inaccurate term: my “choices” are always a mixture of randomness and deliberate intervention on the case.
So it was also this time: at the invitation of Simonetta I looked around and Nesbo’s book, an author that I read almost exclusively when I’m traveling, was there, in front of me. Ready to be “worked”.
In this case, the work I immediately imagined was a double meaning not as “underlying sense” and “other” but as an amplification of the meaning of the book.
Without recalling the plot, I will only say that it is a Nesbo, usually very “gothic”, in full drift splatter; Manipulation, violence, sick sex and “extreme” mental deviations. All in the background of a rich and environment-friendly Norway but teeming with toxic, alcoholic, marginal of all kinds. An environment in which every character of the plot is the bearer of a passion that contemplates death as possible (and sometimes inevitable) way out.
So I decided for an intervention with fire and with thread. With the fire of my fusion torch I burned the book in several parts, creating holes and lesions, as the obsessions carried to their extreme consequences leave wounded bodies and devastated souls in the story. I crossed the book with the red thread, “doubling it” as a plot, a trail of signs and, of course, a seam. As among the characters of Nesbo, who try in vain to sew up their wounds exploding the most unspeakable drives, my threads “bind” the pages without a pre-established order or an outcome of some use (and here the thought would go to the ontological uselessness of art, but this would take us too far..). The mystery of events, of each event at the end, can never be completely solved, we may arrive at temporary solutions that refer to other mysteries.
The conclusion of any investigation, even of those that lead to the affirmation of some truth in THIRST, therefore refers to new obscurities.
To other “holes” of understanding. Like those who are now in the body of a book, this book, inside the pages and in its interstices.
It must be said that the detective investigating the cases in question is called Harry HOLE (..).
So really the choice was almost obligatory.
dorismaninger 
About the altered book. That is pretty cool, my mom likes to do that, and has participated in books that travel from one artist to the other.