honorable mention
Florin Firimita united states
title
The Bookstore Project
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entry description
“The Bookstore Project” started in 2012 with a visit to a friend who has amassed an enormous amount of volumes in an old mill in Northern Massachusetts. The space has fascinated me for years. A strange, striking mess, it lacks the structure of a typical store where everything is usually carefully confined and cataloged. It is a bit melancholy - like an abandoned cathedral, an ancient city or an archaeological dig. I thought of the fragility of beauty, at the courage of the Body confronting Time. I thought that in order to read all the volumes in the Bookstore, one would have to be immortal. I looked at my own library and felt sad because I realized that all those books will outlive me. Maybe I inadvertently turned into a monk trying to foolishly save Beauty and Knowledge. Yet, as I read this, I can’t help a smile: maybe it’s a lot simpler than that; maybe the whole thing is nothing more than an obsession, and in the end, perhaps even a small victory: Few could deny that books and women are one of the few sacred places left where beauty will continue to reside despite the constant convulsions of our troubled century. In the end, maybe that’s what I tried to achieve: remind people that books still matter and secure a form of immortality for my dreams.back to gallery