Atlantic Undercurrents: Kielland, Bruscky, and Artists’ Books

My first encounter with artists’ books took place in 1999, when I visited the studio of the Pernambuco-based artist Paulo Bruscky for the very first time. His vast archive (more than seventy thousand items accumulated over decades) became, quite literally, my school of contemporary art. It was there, among correspondences, experimental publications, unique books, conceptual pamphlets, and fragile objects, that I learned to read artistic practice as a field where text, image, idea, and materiality are inseparable and must be experimented. Over the years, I curated several exhibitions of Bruscky’s work and his archive, and eventually edited a book dedicated to his writings, Arte e Multimeios – Paulo Bruscky.

More than two decades later, now living in Lisbon for over ten years, the announcement of the Itchy Fingers residency awakened a form of saudade I had not expected: a longing for Bruscky’s studio, for the physical presence of those books, for the possibility of handling them freely, without gloves, vitrines, mediation, or distance. Artists’ books entered my life through a place where they were alive, circulating in conversation, research, and chance encounters. When I learned that Sølvberget Library housed a public collection of artists’ books that was touchable, borrowable, allowed to inhabit the daily rhythms of readers, the idea alone was enough to draw me to Stavanger.

The artists’ book collection begun in 2022 and nurtured with exceptional care by Anne Helen Robberstad consists of more than eighty items, largely by women artists, offering a broad panorama of Scandinavian production and its contemporary developments. Leafing through the publications that theorize and historicize the genre, those available in the library, often written from Euro-American frameworks or limited to well-known avant-gardes, one sees how much remains to be narrated, such as the delicacy of gestures, the detours, micro-histories, the material strategies that escape grand narratives. It was precisely in this in-between space, between gaps, frictions, and silences, that this residency invited me to think. This residency enabled me to get to know the writer Alexander Kielland. I could just see the similarities between him and Paulo Bruscky, and providing this dialogue was my real drive towards this project.

Kielland opens Garman & Worse (1880) by allowing the sea to establish, from the very beginning, the ethical and existential horizon of the novel. For him, the sea is an unlimited mirror of the human condition, patient, free, unreachable, before which we, small “dwarfs of the earth,” silently deposit the world’s lamentations. Kielland insists that the sea is not treacherous, for it never promised anything; it beats, without demands, its “great heart,” the last still intact “in a sick world.” Its voice, ancient and continuous, is perceived differently by each person, for it “has a different word for everyone who places themselves face to face with it.” At the center of Stavanger, the writer’s statue seems to prolong that act of listening: it watches the port’s rhythms, the constant flow of ships, birds, and people. The water that structures part of the novel, watching the city under the fictional name of Sandvig, and which, many thousands of kilometers to the south, breaks upon the coast of Recife in Pernambuco, Brazil, suggesting an oceanic continuity that transcends geographical and narrative borders.

This connection between Stavanger and Recife rests on the dynamic architecture of the ocean itself. In the North Atlantic, particularly near Iceland, Greenland, and Norway, the warm waters of the Gulf Stream lose heat, become denser, and sink, giving rise to the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). This sinking marks the beginning of a long-term journey. The mass of water moves southward at a depth of about 3,000 to 4,000 meters, crossing the Equator and directly linking the hemispheres. In the South Atlantic, it encounters and mixes with other major water masses including Antarctic Bottom Water and Circumpolar Water,before continuing toward the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is a slow, almost geological circulation, taking between 600 and 1,000 years to complete a full cycle. Yet it is this dilated temporality that ensures the climatic and ecological interdependence between regions as far apart as the Norwegian and the Pernambucan coasts. Stavanger, whose maritime history enabled and profoundly shaped the life of the city, inscribed itself into this global movement long before science described it. It was from there that, in July 1825, the Restauration, the so-called “Norwegian Mayflower,” departed, carrying six families on a fourteen-week journey and inaugurating organized Norwegian migration to North America. And what if the route had been toward South America? Would they have arrived in Pernambuco? Most likely not.

Recife is an aquatic city. Crossed by the Beberibe and Capibaribe rivers, it lies below sea level, and astrologers like to say it is a Pisces city. The reefs that gave it its name form a natural harbor that has existed for millions of years, long before the Portuguese colonization of the region began in 1535. At first a fishing village (the main city was Olinda), it was redesigned and elevated to the capital of Pernambuco by the Dutch, who governed the territory for twenty-four years (1630–1654). From this natural port, hundreds of sugar-laden ships departed for Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, transforming Pernambuco into the largest sugar-producing center in the world. The captaincy became the richest in colonial Brazil, sustaining an opulent economy based on slave labor and hosting a number of sugar mills far superior to that of other regions, surpassed only by Bahia. This centrality gave Pernambuco a strategic position in the global market, to the point that, after being expelled, the Dutch established sugar mills in the Caribbean using the technical knowledge they had acquired in Brazil. It is plausible that sugar also connected the ports of Recife and Stavanger. Pernambuco’s “white gold” may well have sweetened the food and drink of Alexander Kielland’s ancestors. By the late 19th century, Recife was no longer an economic powerhouse nor the main destination for the thousands of immigrants arriving in Brazil.

When Paulo Bruscky’s father arrived in Recife from Russia in the late 1930s, he was accompanying a dance troupe touring South America and eventually made the city his final port. He sought freedom and found it in a land of contestatory traditions. He taught photography to his most curious son, and perhaps also a disposition toward nonconformity. At twenty, Paulo had already won the 1st Prize of the Pernambuco Art Salon with a drawing called O Guerrilheiro, an explicit homage to those resisting Latin American dictatorships. The award came one year after Institutional Act No. 5, at the height of repression, and represented both the boldness of the young artist and the courage of the jury that selected him. According to the Salon’s rules, the work should have been automatically incorporated into the collection of the State Museum of Pernambuco; however, pressured by military authorities, the museum’s administration made the arbitrary decision to replace the prize-winning work with another piece by the artist –an act that revealed the diffuse, constant censorship of the period. The episode foreshadowed what would become one of the central axes of Bruscky’s trajectory: aesthetic experimentation inseparable from ethics, the direct confrontation with structures of power, and the defense of freedom as a non-negotiable principle.

Born a century before Bruscky and in a social and cultural world almost opposite to that of the Pernambucan artist, Kielland also defied conventions and disobeyed the norms of his time. He was one of the writers who best responded to Georg Brandes’s call to “put problems up for debate,” situating himself at the heart of the Modern Breakthrough of the 1880s. The son of an aristocratic family and heir to a solid commercial house, he seemed destined to repeat the path of his forebears. Yet he abandoned that secure world and moved to Paris, where he decided to become a writer; a gesture that condensed rupture and reinvention. There he embraced realism as his instrument and social critique as his vocation. In just twelve years, he produced a body of work that became a reference point: the short stories he called novellettes, a new form in Norwegian literature; vivid and complex portrayals of 19th-century Stavanger; and incisive examinations of class hierarchies, hypocrisy, and the tensions between old and new. His writing, precise and restless, illuminated the fissures of a society in transformation and secured his place among the great critical chroniclers of his time.

What Stavanger represented for Kielland, Recife means for Bruscky: a safe harbor, a source of inspiration, and a place of contradictions that fuel his poetics and worldview, as well as the setting for much of his work. His relationship with the city, as he himself says, is visceral. Fascinated by its geography, cut by rivers and close to the sea, Bruscky grew accustomed to working on bridges, walking through the city without repeating routes, allowing the chance of drift to guide his gaze. Recife, flat and open to urban interventions, became not only the territory through which he circulates but also the mental landscape from which his ideas emerge. Like the Norwegian writer, Bruscky placed his peripheral city at the center of the world, transforming it into a platform for universality. In the early 1970s, he connected with international movements of visual poetry and Mail Art, coming into contact with artists from various countries including members of the Gutai Group in Japan and of Fluxus, establishing bridges that enabled both the global circulation of his work and the arrival in Recife of experimental productions from abroad. With local partners, he organized the three editions of the International Mail Art Exhibition (1975, 1976, and 1978); the second was shut down at its opening by the National Information Service, resulting in death threats to his family and the imprisonment of Bruscky and Daniel Santiago. In 1981, the Bruscky & Santiago team organized Artdoor – I International Outdoor/Artdoor Art Exhibition, bringing together 190 artists from 25 countries and reaffirming the city as a place of circulation, invention, and resistance.

Bruscky’s engagement with Mail Art goes beyond its “anti-bourgeois,” “anti-commercial,” and “anti-system” origins; in Latin America, these characteristics acquired another layer: an anti-dictatorship dimension. In contexts without restrictions on civil liberties, Mail Art was a means of transgressing modernist values in art and its systems of legitimization and distribution; but in countries under oppressive regimes (such as in Latin America and Eastern Europe), it also meant transposing very concrete barriers to the exchange of ideas and ideals. The postal service, unintentionally, became an ally in the uncensored circulation of these works, given the impossibility of inspecting all correspondence. Censorship did occur at other stages of the process, as in the suspension of the Second International Mail Art Exhibition, but such measures were rare compared to the volume of transgressive works in circulation. Thanks to this vast transnational network, news of two political events involving mail artists in Latin America spread internationally: the persecution, imprisonment, and exile of the Salvadoran artist Jesús Romeo Galdámez, and the imprisonment and torture of Clemente Padín and Jorge Caraballo between August 1977 and November 1979 in Montevideo. This episode triggered a dramatic shift in the Mail Art network, as it prompted an intense international campaign for the freedom of Padín and Caraballo. The noise made by artists reached Amnesty International and created pressure on Uruguayan embassies in various countries.

From early on, Bruscky understood that these experimentations challenged the art system and, therefore, were not encouraged, studied, or preserved with the rigor they required, especially in Latin America. The institutional environment in Recife in the 1970s was precarious. There were no public art libraries and no galleries systematically devoted to the avant-garde of the period. The awareness of the ephemerality of what he created, coupled with the need to study and research, led him to construct an archive-studio, a living organism where everything accumulates and enters into dialogue: objects found in the street for future works, rare books, notebooks of ideas, correspondence, documents, newspaper clippings, and works of his own and by artists from all continents. This environment, spread across two buildings, may seem chaotic to an outside eye but follows its own logic, catalogued according to a system created by Bruscky himself. There rest, and continually awaken, nearly 70,000 documents and works which keep the artist in constant movement between past, present, and possible futures.

The multidisciplinary nature of his practice manifests itself through a wide variety of media, among which artists’ books occupy a central place. In 1982, for instance, Bruscky received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a children’s artist’s book project. It is no coincidence that the first International Artist’s Book Exhibition held in Brazil was organized by him, as Coordinator of Visual Arts at the 2nd Winter Festival of the Catholic University of Pernambuco in August 1979. It brought together 91 artists from 16 countries and inaugurated a pioneering line of work that he would continue to develop in the following decades. Since then, Bruscky has organized about thirty national and international exhibitions devoted to the genre, based on the collection he has gathered over more than half a century. His archive houses approximately 500 artists’ books from Brazil and abroad, including fundamental names of the Gutai Group and Fluxus: Shozo Shimamoto (who created a unique book especially for an exhibition curated by Bruscky in Recife), John Cage, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Ben Vautier, Bruno Munari, Claes Oldenburg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dick Higgins, Dieter Roth, Eugen Gomringer, George Brecht, George Maciunas, Daniel Spoerri, John Armleder, Joseph Beuys, Mieko Shiomi, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Robert Filliou, Robin Crozier, Wolf Vostell, and many others. The collection thus reflects the interests and connections of its owner, generating a kind of contextual universe for his own production.

The artists’ books in Bruscky’s collection can be researched, handled, felt, and experienced in his studio. Visits take place according to his availability, since it is his workspace and he has no employees or assistants. Access to the books is always mediated by him in lively, lengthy conversations that become true lessons in the history of global experimental art, accompanied by beer, wine, soft drinks, and snacks. The cataloguing follows a division by countries and states, and works can be stored as books or as objects, occupying three-dimensional space on shelves. Bruscky’s own works are grouped together and separated according to the type of space they occupy. When these books are shown in exhibitions, they cannot be touched, as museum protocols of safety and conservation are applied; a stark contrast to the place where they live and remain alive. The collection is thus part of a large dynamic ecosystem that responds to the organicity of the archive-studio itself.

Back in Kielland’s city, more than eight thousand kilometers away, another collection of artists’ books constitutes a dynamic ecosystem within a public institution: the Sølvberget Library and Art Center. It is a pulsating place, frequented daily by people of all ages, backgrounds, and social classes, and it seems to be the heart of Stavanger. Libraries and cultural centers are intrinsically places of knowledge-sharing and generosity, but few are as vibrant and truly experienceable by such a varied public. Next to the contemporary art exhibition hall is the art book section, which houses the artists’ book collection. They sit there, accessible,waiting to be touched, leafed through, explored, and, most surprisingly, taken home as a library loan, something never seen or experienced by this author. One may live with the chosen works for a week, without mediation or restrictions, following the parameters of librarianship rather than museology. Unlike most types of artworks that exist to be seen, artists’ books must be touched, handled, turned over. That is what gives them meaning. Yet experiencing this interaction in the intimacy of one’s home usually occurs only when we have our own collection. Having only temporary possession of the work adds another layer of meaning: the thrill of the new, the sense of something that must be lived intensely for a certain period. It made me wonder what it would be like if museums lent paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures for visitors to take home for a while. We could live a little of our daily life in the company of artworks that deeply touch us, challenging the entire system sustained by social distinction and market speculation.

I took home three artists’ books and lived with them for a week. They had formats that exceeded the standard notion of publication, and one of them, in particular, became a constant, luminous, vibrant presence during almost-autumn days. Leaf in the Wind, by Kristen Keegan, published by Oilskin Editions, took possession of the dining table, the central place in the apartment, from which I could see it while cooking, having breakfast, eating lunch or dinner, washing dishes, arriving or leaving the house. Its smell blended with the scent of the ground floor. Every so often, I would go over to caress it, observing every nuance of color, the folds, the stitching. I never grew tired of looking at it. It felt as though it had always belonged to that environment. I returned it on the eve of my departure, and it was strange not to find it there anymore. The sadness caused by its absence was brief, for it soon merged with the farewell to the city, to Sølvberget, and to all the remarkable people I met during the residency.

Handling artists’ books in a living archive like Bruscky’s in Recife, or taking them home from Sølvberget in Stavanger, are radically different experiences, yet linked by the same underground current, one as deep and persistent as the oceanic circulation connecting the two ports from the beginning of this text. Just as the waters that descend in the North Atlantic, in the landscapes that shaped Alexander Kielland, resurface transformed in the south, artists’ books also realize themselves through movement: they come alive as they travel between hands, homes, cities, and histories. They are bodies that demand proximity. They only fully exist when touched, leafed through, breathed. Between Recife and Stavanger, between the archive-studio and the public library, I now recognize a gesture common to both: the refusal of enclosure, the defense of knowledge that circulates, brushes, alters; the conviction that art is not meant to be merely contemplated from afar, but lived. The artists’ book, in this sense, functions like a small tide, a call to intimacy and a challenge to the boundaries between public and private, archive and home, museum and street. And perhaps that is why the phrase by Kielland, which lends its name to this residency, echoes here as well: it applies to the Norwegian writer, to Bruscky, and now to this author, moved by books that demand touch, circulation, and worlds in perpetual motion. 

My fingers are also itching to move the world.