The Rojo is a red bookshelf in the living room of the rented house where my librarian lives with his partner and their son.
At the start of every day, during the period of this project (which now does by the name The Library of Our Future: A Ghost’s Story – note the shift to the collective and possessive) in which I have been dictating these words to him, I point to a book or books on the shelves of his working library (in an office space, shared by a washing machine and a dryer) and he takes it or them in his hands and walks to the living room and stands expectantly before the Rojo.
He opens up the glass doors and choses a book or books from within based on the any number of criteria – some affinity between the books, some theme, or even their approximate size, color or shape.
He then packs both sets of books – those from his working library and those from the Rojo – in his backpack and brings them to his campus office.
He sits down, takes them out of his backpack, flips through the pages, and sometimes takes a photo or two, and then proceeds to write a post on his Minus Plato blog, like this one.
At the end of the day, he leaves the book or books from the Rojo in his office – if he can find space on his shelves, then he slots it/them in there, or more likely, he leaves it/them in an every-growing pile on the floor.
He then packs the book or books from his working library back into his backpack, returns home and then places it/them in the Rojo.
The next day the cycle begins again, although on weekends the books are selected, written about and then brought as an accumulation to his office on Monday.
Today he chose two books based on their size, color and shape (as you can see from the photo above that he took earlier of him clutching them in front of the Rojo – this is very much a staged photo in preparation for this particular pose, he doesn’t usually take a photo of the books in this setting or in this way).
Yet, he sits here typing these words, the two books lie open on his campus office desk, and he takes two photos of them spread out between the desk and his lap – here are the photos, of a work by Gabriel Orozco (Island in an Island, 1993) and a poem by Cecilia Vicuña (‘Entering’, from Precarious, 1966-2015).
These photographs seem to suggest that you, dear reader, could read these two books and these two artist adjacent to or in relation to each other.
Can you? Can they?