Jill Magi

“An Old Book Became Threads”

Images- Threads

Bio

Commentary

"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. 
 
The book remains dangerously fragile--even more so after all my 
mark-making, gluing, soaking. The binding has been pushed almost beyond its 
limits. So I was pushing against the limits of "the book" and the 
limits of what is held in the body as language. Creating new pages/skins, I 
was reading/drawing/writing my way into what would eventually be a new 
book called Threads.