One month after our post on the POA art scene, Mama exhibits her own work in the Bienal B. Through a course on Artists' Books at Subterrânea Atelier, a nifty little gallery nearby, she created this object (above) that she later learned is called an 'altered book.' Altered may be too gentle of a word to describe the way she hacked away at it with an exacto-knife, not to mention drilling, carving, sewing, photocopying onto transparencies, and inserting a lightbulb, but it is certainly accurate.
The books she mauled were Portuguese translations of two Jules Verne books, The Castle of the Carpathians and Village in the Treetops, the latter title aptly describing our little life here above the park. Appropriate for the piece's themes of buoyancy, travel, and motion, when she calculated which pages would be the center of the book, one was the chapter entitled, "Os Dois Viajantes" (The Two Travelers [though I have plans to scratch out "Dois" and add "Tres"]) and the other was "Viagem Fluvial" (River Journey).
Many of the books on display (see below) were journals and diaries of artists, and others, like Mamas, were riffs on the concept of a book, created specifically for exhibition.
The books created during the class were on exhibit for the last week of the show. A collective decision was made to suspend Mama's creation from the ceiling (you can see it glowing in the corner in the photo below).
Happy reading, slicing, dicing, or however it is that you want to dig into your book today.
