Collected with the precision of a forensic scientist and with the patience of a librarian, paper stripes emerge from my discarded and shredded documents, notes and paper artworks, refusing to obey the old authority, they reinvent their own narrative, their own order out of the refuse's chaos. In the case of Shredded: Off the Grid, a specific project for the Midtown New York Public Library, I solely use the library's publication Now, redistributing its content with shredded paper loops stitched onto a light fabric drape. In these, the grid melts into a continuous and natural stream, such as the flow of people moving inside public spaces or, as the flow of the eye restlessly looking, scanning, reading through visual profusion and, beyond bar-codes, the structural secrecy of the digital age. What is the future of the "library" as a physical public space? This project is an homage to the sensuality of paper, to text as object, at a time where the digital offers us access to almost every possible thought, suppressing-denying-making obsolete 3 out of 5 of our sensory "devices."

Pauline Galiana

Pauline Galiana