fink twice 507: Through the Words of Others

This book is published as Volume 7 of the paperback series fink twice.

Since books answer, quote and sometimes echo or contradict each other, they are singular voices added together in the library: a collection of possible and infinite conversations made up of combinations of thoughts that each reader, in his or her intimacy, invites, groups and reorganizes. The personal library is thus a whole, a "bibliography" that can reveal the emergence of possible complex thoughts, if we wish to play with them, by activating fragments, in the light of our present.

Based on a method devised by Roland Barthes in 1977, when he was preparing his course on The Neutral at the Collège de France, Stéphanie Serra draws on her collection of books to recreate a dialogue fragmented by photocopies of covers covering works from Virginia Woolf to Roland Barthes. The writing is punctuated by the words of each author or the publishing becomes a collaborative project that functions as an all-encompassing library for writers and readers.

Using games of chance to decide on the arrangement of the paragraphs between them, but also on the link between text and images, the essay can be read, as it was written (following the numbers to re-form the chronology of writing), or as it is printed, to leave to the randomness of the encounters (of the content of the pages on the left - images-books - with that of the pages on the right - text -) the possibility of creating new meanings, as can happen in a library.

The essay is published by Fink in English. The original French version was presented as part of a two-year research project at the CCC-HEAD in Geneva, under the supervision of Catherine Quéloz and Liliane Schneiter in 2016 and under the title Y voir clair à travers les mots des autres. The library open to dialogue to grasp the present. Towards a methodology of layout.