Expect insights and frictions

As the daughter of a writer and poet, I grew up surrounded by poets and writers. For a long time, I felt that my writing had to find its own voice, distinct from my father’s. This led me to dedicate myself to other types of writing: curatorial texts, critical essays, and research-driven narratives, all of them connected to my work as a curator and institutional leader. Over the years, I’ve built a practice of writing that was always in service of something else,for instance an exhibition, an artist’s work, a research project, but rarely for its own sake.

Recently, I’ve been feeling the need to experiment and allow my writing to cross boundaries, to test formats that are less rigid and more porous. The Itchy Fingers residency is, for me, an opportunity to dedicate myself fully to writing as an artistic/critical and exploratory act; not as a secondary tool, but as a primary form of thinking and creating.

What excites me about this residency is the possibility of approaching writing with the same depth and attention that I usually reserve for curatorial projects. Although there is a pre-established outcome (a 3,000-word essay), I see this framework as an opportunity to experiment with voice, structure, and narrative strategies in ways that go beyond the formats I usually work with. The challenge lies in balancing this freedom of exploration with the rigor of producing a text that communicates ideas clearly, while still holding the openness and sensibility that I wish to bring to my writing.

Absolutely. My academic background in philosophy and sociology has deeply enriched my writing about art. These fields have given me analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that allow me to approach both artworks and archives from multiple angles; questioning underlying structures, exploring the social and political contexts of production, and engaging with the ethical dimensions of memory. At this point in my life, however, I seek to look beyond these tools, embracing more intuitive, affective, and situated ways of seeing that open up other layers of meaning and connection.

The notion of “archival fiction” and “curatorial fabulation” in my work stems from Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. Hartman uses this term to describe a method that combines historical research with speculative narrative, as a way to address the silences, gaps, and erasures in the archive, especially in the histories of marginalized communities.

In my own practice, “archival fiction” means using imaginative strategies to bring to the surface what might have been excluded, destroyed, or never recorded, while still engaging critically with the archive’s structure and limitations. “Curatorial fabulation” extends this approach into the curatorial field, it allows me to rethink the role of the curator, moving beyond the function of organizing and interpreting existing material, to actively engaging in the creation of new, speculative narratives that bridge documented history and imagined possibilities.

In recent years, my research into matriarchal studies has expanded this methodology, opening space to imagine and fabulate matriarchal futures and to develop matriarchal curatorial practices grounded in care, reciprocity, and the nurturing of both artworks and the people who create them. For me, these methods not only question the authority of the archive but also expand its boundaries, inviting audiences to inhabit other possible histories and futures.

Working with Paulo Bruscky’s personal archive of artist books and engaging with the public library collection presents a fascinating encounter between two very different ecosystems of knowledge. Bruscky’s archive is highly idiosyncratic — shaped by his life, networks, and the experimental ethos of mail art and conceptual practices in Latin America. It carries the marks of a lived, embodied practice, where classification is often porous, and the story of each book is inseparable from the story of how it was made, exchanged, or acquired.

By contrast, the Sølvberget collection is embedded in a public institution, operating within cataloguing systems that prioritize accessibility, standardized metadata, and preservation protocols. While this allows for a broad, democratic reach, it also necessarily flattens certain idiosyncrasies in favor of legibility and order.

I expect the dialogue between them to generate both insights and frictions, questions about what gets preserved, how access is granted, and whose stories are made visible. It will be an opportunity to reflect on how artist books can exist simultaneously as works of art, historical documents, and living agents within different systems and how each context shapes the way we read, interpret, and value them.

In this space of encounter, friction is a fertile ground for fabulation, a place where the strict order of institutional systems and the fluid, personal logic of a living archive can rub against each other, sparking new narratives, speculative readings, and imaginative futures for what an archive of artist books might be.

For me, artist books embody the expansion and imaginative possibilities of art. The book, one of the most established forms for constructing and perpetuating knowledge and narratives, is “profaned” by visual artists, pushed beyond its limits, and made to overflow into other territories. Its familiar, standardized format becomes a site of challenge, play, and reinvention.

Because writing finds one of its most powerful and enduring forms in the book, to write about artist books is also to question and disrupt the genre itself. It is an invitation to think with and through the object, to acknowledge its materiality, its resistance to fixed meanings, and its capacity to merge visual, tactile, and textual languages into singular experiences that no other art form quite replicates.

These frameworks give me the possibility to experiment with what I carry in my own ancestry and place in the world. Feminist and decolonial perspectives open a space for me to write from lived experience, embodied knowledge, and the awareness that my position is never neutral. They allow me to resist the demand for an impersonal, “universal” voice, and instead embrace subjectivity, relationality, and situated thinking.

In practice, this means acknowledging the histories I inherit, the privileges and vulnerabilities that shape my gaze, and the multiplicity of voices, especially those historically excluded, that I want my writing to be in conversation with. It also means challenging dominant narratives, experimenting with form, and allowing affect, intimacy, and care to coexist with critical rigor. For me, writing within these commitments is both a political stance and a creative method: it reclaims the right to speak from where I stand, while remaining open to transformation through encounter.

To caretake a collection of artist books is to honor their material and conceptual singularity, to see them not only as objects to be preserved, but as living works with stories, relationships, and contexts that extend far beyond their pages. Artist books often require a highly exploratory form of handling, far more than conventional books, and this presents a particular challenge for their conservation. Balancing the need for preservation with the desire for active engagement is part of the work’s complexity.

Writing is very much part of this process. For me, it is a way of translating the tactile, visual, and conceptual experience of these books into another medium, without flattening their complexity. Sometimes this means descriptive writing; other times, it becomes a more speculative or poetic response that resonates with the spirit of the work. Writing about artist books is also a way of carrying forward, for future generations, the meanings, ideas, and contexts of an analog culture, one in which slowness, materiality, and the intimacy of touch play a central role. In both cases, writing becomes another form of care — a way to accompany the book, to deepen its presence, and to ensure that its story continues to unfold.

Yes, I am arriving with both questions and intentions. This will be my first time in Norway and also my first experience working with a public collection of artist books, which adds a layer of curiosity and openness to my approach. One of my main goals is to explore how two very different collections, Paulo Bruscky’s deeply personal, idiosyncratic archive and Sølvberget’s public library collection, can speak to one another, and what tensions or resonances might emerge between their systems, narratives, and modes of accessibility.

I am also interested in asking how we can write about artist books in ways that honor their materiality, context, and multiplicity without reducing them to conventional categories of art criticism or bibliography. How can writing become an extension of the book itself, playful, porous, and speculative?

Ultimately, my goal is to use the residency as a space to experiment with “archival fiction” and “curatorial fabulation,” informed by my research in matriarchal studies, to imagine possible futures for how artist books are read, cared for, and activated in the world.

Yes, I am currently engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with Moroccan artist Ziad Naitaddi, which takes as its starting point the path traced by the sand from the Sahara Desert to fertilize the Amazon rainforest. In the Amazon, this phenomenon is vital: the phosphorus carried by the Saharan dust compensates for the losses caused by heavy rainfall, sustaining one of the richest ecosystems on the planet. In Europe, however, the same Dust, which spreads over the skies of Iberian Peninsula, Italy, France, Caribbean Sea and South America, is often regarded as sterile or even a health hazard.

This stark contrast leads us to reflect on how scientific facts and biological realities can be framed through different, sometimes opposing, socio-political lenses. It also resonates with the polarized narratives around migration, especially from the Global South, in contemporary Europe, where the same “arrival” can be perceived as either enriching or threatening, depending on the discourse.

The project, developed as both an artistic and discursive investigation, is rooted in a dialogue between the African and American continents, as well as the countries that encompass the Sahara desert. It addresses themes of fertilization, interdependence, and the coexistence of opposites, asking how an arid and vulnerable region like Bodelé in Chad can sustain the vitality of a lush and distant ecosystem like the Amazon. It is a meditation on the fact that the most fragile environments can nurture the most abundant ones, a paradox that echoes not only in nature but also in human relations, migration, and cultural exchange.