‘As a journey into a studio’s archives, this book is a narrative. An inventory of a collection, it could be called a museum catalogue. It can also serve as a guide to the work whose history it relates here.’ (Joëlle Tuerlinckx, 2024)
This artist’s book, ‘inventory-catalogue of a museum by itself’, chronicles the development of a work of art by Joëlle Tuerlinckx – a museum as monument, commissioned for a former coalfield. Without walls, the museum imbues the air with memory, reaching out to the universal.
The book has all the hallmarks of a classic art catalogue: a generous presentation format, with works displayed frontally detached from their context, printed in colour on coated paper. That idea of classicism inspires and guides the design but is also radically disrupted. For instance, the book is set entirely in Courier font and introduced by an absent text, represented by abstract lines.
