OCCUPATIONAL RHYTHMS (2024) Performance w/ Pascal Lund-Jensen, 20 min. Kunst und Bau Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Bregenz AT
The newly installed return machine at Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek serves as a gate through which the library’s inventory returns to the safe confines of the library after having been lent out. Imprints of the book content remain outside, in the readers’ minds, spreading to other parts of society through conversation, rethinking, and mutating through onward mediation. The books, for their part, carry all their readers with them through immaterial traces of use, the slow wear of the books through repetition and time, as well as direct traces such as folded corners, coffee stains, underlinings, and margin notes.
Through the return machine, the books enter the hull of the library, the area for the invisible care work that prepares them for their further function as library inventory. The shelvers sort the books and transport them back to their place in the library or forward them to external archiving facilities. Books that have gotten bruised while outside or finally penetrated by years of slow wear are taken to the bookbinding workshop, where they are cared for, repaired, and restored by experienced, gentle hands.
The sound piece builds on recordings of the workflow in the bookbinding workshop, and of book handling and book transportation in the rest of the library. These sounds are merged wirth recordings of sentences, phrases, and bits of language collected during conversations with the shelvers and the bookbinder and from traces from the loaners found in the books in the return machine; through underlinings, margin notes, post-it notes with scribbles on them, and a letter here and there used as a bookmark.
