EXPERIMENTAL BOOKS

Small books folded from black paper. Each opens as a concertina and stands on its own edges instead of lying flat. The pages carry pale marks — dots, arcs, rows of glyphs, a figure with a balloon — and on some sheets the chlorine has eaten right through, leaving holes with singed rims. One is bound by hand in red thread. Chlorine drawn onto black paper. The bleach takes colour out rather than putting it on, so every mark is a subtraction; left long enough it stops being a mark and becomes a hole. He calls them experimental books because they do not meet the characteristics of a conventional book — no reading order, and letters that never make a word. Cluj-Napoca, 2018, made for the degree show at UAD and set out on a floor sheet bleached into a star map. Three are named in the thesis: Looking for letters, Behind alphabets and language, and Primal. That middle title later returned as the subtitle of TOTEM. They were shown again two years later at Espronceda in Barcelona, standing open on a plinth rather than on the floor — the same books, off the star map and up at eye level.