Claudia de la Torre
Interview realised in autumn 2021
Claudia, there is something interesting in your position and that’s why I wanted to do this interview with you, not only you are an artist who does books, but you also publish other artists books. If I could sum up, and correct me if I am wrong, but publishing is your artistic practice. Also, to begin this conversation, could you please introduce yourself, your background?
That is true. I do consider publishing in the wider sense of the term as my practice. To make something public, ideas public. I create concept based publications. It has always been hard to define myself, but I’ll give it a try. I am a Mexican artist, publisher and thinker living in Germany (Berlin) since thirteen years. In 2011 I started backbonebooks not really knowing what I was getting myself to and with the need of finding a way to distribute the books I was creating at that time. In this ten years it has grown into a platform that allows me not only to self-publish myself but also to work with friends, or artists whose work I find relevant. This has nothing to do with being a known, or unknown artist, but rather an appreciation towards their work. A labor that grows out of interest and curiosity.
How do you come with this idea of working with books? Were they already part of your work at the time?
When I was a student, my body of work developed around the concepts of memory, repetition and difference. I was constantly re-arranging found material, using archival strategies such as keeping things inside binders, categorizing and trying to understand new ways of working with order. Books are naturally objects in which material is already ordered (either in volumes, pages, in a shelf, beside other books, in libraries, lists, from A to Z, from 1 to 100). Books and libraries were spaces in which I always felt safe in. Before even knowing what an artist-book was. This organically came into the surface in 2010. Back then (and still having in mind how materials have a memory of its own) I made my first ‘‘book work.’’ Black Snow consisted of a simple rule: starting with an A4 page, to make as many photocopies needed in order to go back to a white page. This way the toner of the printer would be finished and so the work. A photocopy is never just a copy, but always an original. I divided the work into days, each day perfect-bound containing 100 copies each. One volume a day. From that moment on, I wanted to explore all the possibilities the book as a medium has to offer. I was officially an obsessed book maker.
In 2011, you created backbonebooks, a way for you to officialize, or formalize your own practice and support other’s work. A part of your work, which deals with image and a reflection on the space you show it, used to be exhibited in art spaces. How do you come to this desire to develop your own publishing house?
In 2011 I was about to finish my art studies in the Adbk Karlsruhe. At that time, in the same Academy I met Thomas Geiger. He was the only book interested person I knew back then, and he was starting a self-publishing house himself (Mark Pezinger Books). I had recently made a book Twenty Six (unknown) Gasoline Stations a homage to Ed Ruscha, before even knowing about this remake hype. So I came to Thomas and asked if he would be interested in publishing the book. He turned to me and with the honesty that characterizes him told me that he was not really interested because the book didn’t fit his program. To be honest with you I felt super disapointed at the moment. I couldn’t understand what he was saying! – but ten years after, with 77 books behind me, now I do. That moment pushed me. It made me realize that you don’t have to wait for others to open you a door. That actually you can create your own way and follow it. The next day after the rejection I officially created backbonebooks. I had a lucid dream in which that name appeared out of the nothing. In the middle of my dream I woke up, made a quick note and when I woke up there it was. A yellow post-it with the note ‘‘backbonebooks’’ a column that holds pages.
When checking at your website, there is something that intrigued me a lot, you wrote ‘‘A book is also a sculpture, an object.’’ Could you tell us more about that idea?
I like to understand a book in all its qualities. To take in account its physical aspect but also its conceptual. If I say a book is an object, then I can deconstruct the idea. An object can be understood in many ways – an object is a volume that occupies space, that relates to the body.
As a pile of layering pages. As a block, as a piece of paper. The form is then expanded. A book doesn’t necessarily has to have a bound spine. It can exist in many other ways. When I think about this, then my way of making books is also expanded. It opens a new field of understanding. I am able to move within a flexible frame.
Collaboration, apart from the books of other artists you publish is also part of your work. In Books are Bridges, to take as an example one of your recent projects, you sent postcards to invite more than 150 people (artists, publishers, friends, colleagues, visitors, etc.) to ask for their opinion on the following question: ‘‘Books are brigades between … and …’’ From this show at A-Z, Berlin, you created a book where the content doesn’t depend on you but on the public and answers you will have. How do you come to this type of project? And more especially, what role collaboration plays in your practice?
Collaboration is key. A book has to be activated in order to exist. So it asks for a collaboration between the work and the user. For the project Books are Bridges I wanted to create a new work for the space. It was in the middle of the pandemic and so I thought that I needed to engage the public. If they couldn’t make it to the space, then they should become part of the work. Mail art also asks for collaboration. If I send a postcard, the person has to send it back to me. It asks to not just write something, but to take time and actually send it back.
Bridges are structures to cross from one side to another. I came up with the concept but the book then built itself. This is a work that functions as a bridge that connects people and ideas. Ulises Carrión couldn’t have said it better in a text he wrote for a show in the Print Gallery (Amsterdam 1981) were he exhibited the work Feedback pieces: ‘‘A Mail-Art project is a research on concepts such as individual/group, meaning/interpretation, input/output, creation/destruction (plural authorship). The participation of the public represents a collective re-enactment of a main problem in contemporary art ‘how does art come into existence?’ In Mail-Art the question as well as the answer, regardless of
their eventual ‘aesthetic’ quality, become formal elements of a new art-work.’’