This artist’s book, a catalogue of a museum without walls, chronicles the development of a work of art by Joëlle Tuerlinckx, commissioned for a former coalfield. Tuerlinckx guides us through her studio’s archives, revealing her thought process and culminating in the inventory of the M.M. collection (Musée de la Mémoire, or Museum of Memory). Drawing on the classic museum catalogue and encompassing ‘all of J.T.’s work’, she presents ‘a museum in itself’.
While the book is originally connected to La Triangulaire de Cransac, a monumental work of art for the small town in Aveyron (France), it also puts into perspective the evolution of the museum in its relationship with the artist and the book. Joëlle Tuerlinckx reminds us that if the museum is compared to a book because of its internal organisation, then a book can be compared to a museum because of its systematics and its method of contemplating the object.
Published with two cover versions, with a variant for the introduction and colophon translated into English.
