Funded by Künstlerhaus Lukas in Ahrenshoop and the Fyns Grafiske Værksted in Odense.
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Insight into the book // A film by Yuka Petz Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
The complete episode »Artists’ Books Unshelved«
Mona is standing in the living room in front of the ancestral portrait gallery. Her eyes wander along the long rows of small frames. Carefully, she looks at one face after the other; a lot of polite smiles, mostly friendly distance in them. Next to this, rare exuberance. Now and again, the beautiful moment of absent concentration can be seen. »Please tell me what,« whispers Mona, »do you have to do with me – and what do I have to do with you?«
The disappearance begins unnoticed. Gradually, but steadily, the connections to people and events are cut. If Mona tries to hold a thought, it slips away into the diffuse. Then the restlessness returns: Who am I if I can’t remember anything?
A cut runs lengthwise through the text. Mona’s story is held together by parallel page turning and thus becomes readable. On semi-transparent pages of varying widths, house facades, water, ventilation shafts, fences and other set pieces of urban space are constantly overlapping and rearranging themselves in relation to one another. The individual sequence of turning the pages on both sides results in a multitude of possibilities for wandering through the terrain. At the same time, a feeling of disorientation arises, because in the end one will have to find the way back.