Ten years have passed since the first bookjockey session was held at the blankpaper school, thanks to the organisation of the PlayBlankPaper collective. To commemorate this date I am publishing in English this short summary of what it was like that first time, by Antonio Xoubanova. The spanish version is still available here.
Antonio Xoubanova was the first guest to accept the challenge of being a BookJockey. That was on monday, 26 november 2012, and this was the poster announcing the event:
Once transformed into #BJ_Xoubanova he started his interpretation of what a BookJockey Session could be like. He greeted us with 10 books on the library table with post-it notes with theletters of the alphabet on them. He openen William Klein’s New York and when he got to the post-it with the letter A, he opened Diane Arbus’s Revelations owith the post-it with the letter B on it.
From then on, Xoubanova jumped from book to book through pages that made mutual references, that dialogued visually, that allowed a bridge between both worlds.
The jumping of pages was the resource that #BJ_Xoubanova used as a narrative thread. The story he came to tell us is that of a book, William Klein’s New York, which was a precursor, which opened many doors that later other authors have explored, which, in a certain way, contains other later books.
This video is a recreation of his session with the books he used:
This is the list of the books we were able to see in this session. All these books were available at the BlankPaper Library:
New York 1954.55, William Klein, Lunwerg, 1995.
Diane Arbus: Revelations, Diane Arbus, Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH, 2011.
The Great Unreal, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Editions Patrick Frey, 2011.
The Americans, Robert Frank, Scalo, Zürich/D.A.P., New York, 1993.
Case History, Boris Mikhailov, Scalo, 1999.
____ and Willem, Willem Popelier, post editions, 2010.
The Present, Paul Graham, Mack, London, 2012.
American Night, Paul Graham, steidlMACK, Göttingen, 2003.
Friedlander, Lee Friedlander, Peter Galassi, Richard Benson, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009.
Harry Callahan, Harry Callahan, Fundación La Caixa, 2000.
Try also this way of seeing data through Graph Commons:
BookJockey 