Korzer-Robinson, from Berlin and now working in Bristol, UK, aims to illustrate the process by which we create our past from “fragments of reality in a process that combines the willful aspects of remembering and forgetting with the coincidental and unconscious,” in his own words.
By using pre-existing media as a starting point, certain boundaries are set by the material, which I aim to transform through my process. Thus, an encyclopedia can become a window into an alternate world, much like lived reality becomes its alternate in remembered experience. These books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world, but rather a means to gain insight about oneself.
I make book sculptures/cut books by working through a book, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. In this way, I build my composition using only the images found in the book.
These “bookworks” begin as a volume from the Nouveau Larousse Illustré, the Brockhaus Konversationslexikon or The Boy’s Own Annual — reference works, those sources of vivid and fading fact, practical guidance, definition and explanation of our world, now being gradually superseded by the digital, where all will be recorded and nothing forgotten willfully, coincidentally or unconsciously.
More and more quickly, nostalgia is becoming no longer what it once was. See more of Alexander Korzer-Robinson’s sculpted books here.
Books On Books 