Book Sculptures
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I am often asked how I conceived of the idea of Book Sculptures, whereas I cut, mutilate, and white-out the books I have written. In fact, the idea stems directly from my fiction, in which there is always a confrontation between the story and the writer, between the words and the book. Story and words seem to conduct their own life independently of the writer and the book.
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I was always bothered by the question: what would happen if one day the story refused to be written? If the words decided to leave the story and go their own way? To find out, I used an artists’ knife and began to release the story from my novel, to free the words from my book, “The Mountain”. Indeed, the words began to gush out in a fascinating word-fall. I went on cutting into the book, probing into its soul, discovering new patterns formed by the black letters and the white page, new relationships between the story and its container. Later, I began to erase my own words. I who wrote them was now bringing the story back to its white page. I whitened out the words, clearing space for a new story. While doing so, it became clear that the old words were still there, buried under the whiteness. Moreover, one word here, one word there, refused to be eradicated and kept jumping out of the whiteness. The “survivors” joined together to create a new statement. I thought I eradicated my novel while in fact I was creating new poems from the white archeological dig. My novel “The Mountain” gave birth to a new book of minimalist poetry.
