(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

German author Judith Schalansky tells us when text, image, and design “dovetail perfectly with one another,” the book can “lend order to the world or sometimes even to take its place.” In this presentation, I’d focus on the book-making processes of Schalansky and others, such as Lauren Redniss, Margaret Randall, and Maira Kalman whose books provide a tangible alternative to intangible circumstance. In An Inventory of Losses, Schalansky reflects on twelve objects lost forever (Sappho’s poetry and Casper David Fredrich’s painting of Greifswald Harbor, for example). She moves us from fact to a constructed experience of engagement or imagination through ghostly gray images on black paper and 16-page chapters for each object. The object created provides a way for us to hold the enormity of loss. In Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, she writes she has “invented nothing” but “discovered everything.” The map of place and time draws from history, which she derives from fact and literature, so this also becomes a “poetic project.” For her and others, the book, as art object, is multi-faceted, a way to articulate history and culture, while also giving form to what we need or hope for. In My Life in 100 Objects, poet Margaret Randall acknowledges objects “come with their histories;” she also conveys the “poetry” in them. In this work, she invites us to a “powerful intersection where time, place and material item–practical or symbolic—come together…to push or coax life in a new direction, open a window previously closed, expose a newly-felt pulse.” I’d speak to how the choices authors make in relationship to the mediums they use (visual art and book design, illustration and handwriting, photography and poetry, among others) alter our perspectives, while also offering us reliable—maybe even comforting—resources to navigate the constancy of change.