Takeover – Bring the Books Home
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27.09.2024
Sarmad X Limestone Books
The Space of Heech is coming to an end. You are invited to take a last look at the installation Book As, walk on, and sit on the books that we’ve tiled the floor with. On Friday and Saturday, please come find a book, take it home, and donate it to Space of Heech.
Your donations will go to Heal Palestine.
As publishers, artists, designers, researchers, and academics, we often feel compelled to produce knowledge, theories, perspectives, and stories expressed through language, images, and visual compositions. We then publish these works as books, booklets, pamphlets, zines, and more. Publishing has been a core activity of our independent platform, Sarmad, yet we continuously ask ourselves and others like us: why do we produce (so many) publications?
Limestone introduced us to Stichting Boeken voor
Mensen, a secondhand bookshop located in a warehouse in Maastricht. Just outside the building, we encountered a huge container filled with all kinds of books soon to be recycled. “Free for you to take, as many as you like,” the kind volunteers told us.
Such a container is the final destination for all the books and other publications that we design so meticulously and publish with so much care, sweat, and tears. For the first time in our lives, we walked and jumped on those books, old and new, while the material reality of the books as solid objects rested beneath our feet.
We took many boxes full of books to Space of Heech, aiming to invite more people to feel the books with their feet and rethink the production of books, cultural works, and various forms of conventional knowledge.