"An Old Book Became Threads" documents a book-art project that I worked on after a trip to Estonia.  My father is an Estonian refugee of World War II and in 1997 I traveled there alone, not knowing the language, yet familiar with its sounds from overhearing conversations between relatives as a child. 

Aware of the history of censorship in Estonia--and paralleling that history were deep silences in my family--I became very interested in visiting used book shops.  Surrounding myself with text I could not read seemed right; the pages there were something to feel, evidence of who knows what.  I picked up several things but was attracted to this particular book that was almost completely falling apart.  Call it "the romance of the ruin," but its age and delapidated state matched much of what I saw in Estonia: bullet-ridden buildings, cracking plaster, roads in bad need of re-paving, very few cafes and museums--markers of western European civility and tourism.  Taking this book away from Estonia with me (rescuing it, perhaps like a dream I have of carrying my father's body through a dangerous war-infested forest) and manipulating it (transgressive, an attempt at canceling out the work of a single author and inscribing multiplicity) became a material attempt to write myself into the landscape, into the language, and into history-family history, the history of that war, the history of nation-building and those ideologies. 

“An Old Book Became Threads”