Differences and complementarity of paper and digital in documentation

In this video, Joan Gil Gregorio, historian, art critic and curator, talks about the importance of the document and its preservation to keep it alive. In this sense, far from seeing the digitization of recent years as something opposed to physical documents, Joan Gil Gregorio proposes to understand it as a complementary archiving process.

News from the publishers participating in ArtsLibris ARCOlisboa Online Edition

Per(r)ucho, Valencia
Title: Race to the moon
Author: Jaime Ortega
A laughing odyssey to the moon. We began this project intrigued by the graphic consequences of the space race. The incredible illustrations by Tekhnika Molodezhi in the Soviet Union and Popular Mechanics in the USA as well as an old 19th century astronomical manual called Smith Illustrated. The risographical translation of these graphic sources served as a trigger for the exploration of a story less known than it could be supposed, the obsession with the moon and, what is more interesting, the sudden abandonment, in the 70s, of an illusion that had been building a certain image of man since the 19th century.

PEZPLATA, Madrid
Title: Caminando memoria y deseo
Author: Laura Lio
Single book. Traces of silver ink, black paper and wooden cover. Pezplata Ediciones is a publisher of artist’s books created in 2015, based at the NavEstudio Laura Lio. Its editorial line is drawn on the edge between image and word and is characterized by its diversity of formats, with publications ranging from artist’s books to posters and postcards.

Pierre Von Kleist, Lisboa
Title: Café Bissau
Author: Julião Sarmento
Julião Sarmento has been taking photographs for more than forty years. From early on, his technical and lyrical control of the medium allowed him to develop a personal style. His photographs cover a wide variety of interests: people, places, gatherings, travels, animals in or out of  zoos, cars, experiments on light…Café Bissau is Julião Sarmento’s most ambitious photobook to date, an ambitious journey into the artist’s atlas.

Pierrot Le Fou, Porto
Title: Burning dinosaur bones
Author: Pedro Magalhães
“(…) In this series, the elimination of the figurative and the dissipation of the referent, goes against a conceptualization of the surface, tested in an adjacent plane, where the painting appears tired, without brightness and without depth – to emphasize the abstraction and to reinvent the unique spatiality created by this machine. By burning the dinosaur bones we can intuit other images and obsessions, such as the crashed cars photographed by Mateo Pérez Correa in Siniestros (2015), the (un)inhabited car interiors of Mateo Casteel, the badly repaired cars (2016) of Ronny Campana, or in Karma (2014) about privacy that Oscar Monzón interrupted and illuminated, for five years, at the traffic lights of Madrid. In all of them, the vehicle that Roland Barthes compared to a great Gothic cathedral no longer represents the conquest of speed or gives shape to acceleration, is neither a fetish object nor a symbol of the counterculture, but surrenders to the paradox of immobility that photography has imposed on it, monumentalizing the reflection of its consumption, valuing its uniqueness instead of equivalence and recording what remains after the glory. (…)” Susana Lourenço Marques, 2019

Raíña Lupa/RocioSantaCruz, Barcelona
Title: Frágil es la llama
Author: Francesc Torres
“You’re already on the other side of the image, you’ve already pierced the negative and, quicksilver intact, the mirror of your life reflects nothing but the absence of yourself.” Unpublished text and three photographs by Francesc Torres, composed by hand in Bodoni lead typography, by the MGC Group of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, on 250 gr. Black and white baryta-insulated photographs.

Red Fox Press, Ilha de Achill – Irlanda
Title: Franticham’s Assembling Box Nr. 45 / Visual Poetry And Works Inspired By Fluxus
Author: AA.VV.
Red Fox Press produces artist’s books production and art screenprinting in Achill Island in the West of Ireland. A5 box with contributions from 25 invited artists from 9 countries. Visual poetry, collages, prints, multiples and objects. 40 copies signed and numbered

Roser Sales Noguera, Barcelona
Title: ICE-LAND
Author: Roser Sales Noguera
The artist’s book presented this year is ICE-LAND, this is the result of a trip to Iceland in the year 2018. Following a recurrent way in my work, to travel, collect and find objects such as stones, algae, pieces of lava, feathers … that they are finding me in the treks along the island. It is through these objects, which as a trigger take me to the moments, places and emotions of the road. ICE-LAND is presented in the same format as previous years, a wooden box containing the artist’s book, in this case photographed with his texts.

Rubén Barroso, Sevilla
Title: Anarchy
Author: Rubén Barroso
Anarchy is part of a collection of artist’s books, unique pieces, drawn, about ways of life and vital attitudes, qualified as “objects of thought”. Unique piece, drawn artist’s book, 50 pages on 300 gr. cotton paper.

RV Cultura e Arte, Salvador de Bahia
Title: Marear
Author: Taygoara Aguiar
Marear is an affective cartography composed of images of fishing boats and routes of the ports of Plataforma, Solar do Unhão, Barra and Ilha de Maré, located in All Saints Bay, in Salvador/BA (Brazil). Its structure of wood and special papers, at the same time is and houses boats and cyanotypes on cotton paper, inviting the invention of possible narratives and stories of the fiber or wood boats, saveiros and trawlers that make up the landscape of much of the city’s coast, while representing intimate spaces of the emotional memories built by the artist Taygoara Aguiar. The graphic project begins with photographs of the ships, their respective names and locations, a three-dimensional graphic investigation expressed in the textures, tones and typographies present in the registered ships themselves.

STET Libros & Fotografías, Lisboa
Title: Handbook of the Spontaneous Other
Author: Aikaterini Gegisian
In Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, Aikaterini Gegisian brings together a diverse range of found photographic material produced in Western Europe and the USA during the 1960s and 1970s. Composed of a series of 59 collages, the book playfully recontextualises images from popular culture that Gegisian has sourced — from pornographic magazines, tourist catalogues and National Geographic spreads — in order to subvert the way that the body, nature and pleasure have been represented in Western capitalist fantasies. Divided into nine chapters that follow a metaphysical narrative of colour and sensation, the book ultimately seeks to locate a ‘spontaneous other’; a notion of the self and of pleasure that exists beyond the confines of popular culture and its dominant modes of representation.

Textem Verlag, Hamburgo
Title: Album
Author: Achim Hoops
49 large-format digital drawings based on motifs from TV news, as well as a brochure with an essay by the artist. When it comes to television news, it is striking how much the images shown are always similar, even though they deal with current and unique events. This similarity was unintentionally or deliberately provoked by aesthetic means. As “only” visual constellations, the images can be made similar to each other, even if the objects represented in them are very different. As in a dream, the properties and meanings of various objects are combined in our arsenal of remembered images.

Tinta Invisible Edicions, Barcelona
Title: Filigranas y Mamporros
Author: Carlos Pazos
Tinta Invisible has just released a deluxe edition of 30 copies of Filigranas y Mamporros by Carlos Pazos, with a felt shirt. It is a “diary” structured by the author’s thoughts, which with a similar tone to his two previous works, immerses us in the evolution of his own existence. This story, marked by brilliant speculation, guides us through an infinite number of theories about art, time, style and life. Even the most cowardly of us would like to adopt (sometimes) as a vital mantra some of his reflections since, always with elegance, he seems to verbally caress the darkest aspects of being. And in his own words “opting for cynicism and irony rather than bowing down, forced by the harsh joke of the world’s inflexible deception. Mercis Rossetti

Tristan Barbará, Barcelona
Title: Notas para el final de un siglo…
Author: Jose Ney
The book shows the author’s interest in human beings. People immersed in everyday life, in public spaces and their unconscious relationship with the environment. Seeking in spontaneity the anthropological value as a reflection of those visual experiences that can evoke a dreamlike or irrational appreciation, without losing the interpretation of the supposed reality. With the visual narrative, the author refers to everything: the world and its inhabitants, their illusions, their sadness, beliefs and love; in an instant of hallucinations in convergence with our imaginary spaces.

UQ! Editions, Lisboa
Title: Gramática do Instante e do Infinito
Author: José Eduardo Agualusa
A book more than a book. A real work of art. In fact, the first one with original photographs of José Eduardo Agualusa and his poetry. A limited edition, 116 copies, in which each book-object is a masterpiece of graphic art: all printed in Fine Art with the text on bamboo paper and the photographs on rice paper, finishing off the mark of UQ’s artisan excellence! Editions. Format 37 x 52 cm. Each copy sold will have 30% of the income reverted to the Pykoré Indigenous Association of the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó people of the Amazon. Here below we leave you a video of the author presenting his book.

Value Manifesto, Basel
The Value Manifesto is the first crypto multiple in the history of art. The symbolic bearer of the manifesto is a manufactured display with state-of-the-art nixie tubes and IoT technology. Those machines’ only purpose is to display the currently highest real-time value of the crypto edition in Swiss Francs.