Who is involved in Missingbooks?
Missingbooks is Maxine Kopsa, Germaine Kruip and Maria Barnas. Maxine is curator and writer on art, Germaine is an artist, and I -Maria Barnas - am a writer/poet and artist.

 

Where are you from?
We're from Amsterdam

 

How did the project started?
We were visiting the Manifesta in San Sebastian last summer, where we got talking about the fact that we are on very long waiting lists at second hand book shops to get good catalogues of artists. The specific one we wanted at the time was of Bas Jan Ader, dutch artist from the seventies who made great shortfilms. He disappeared while making the work which he called 'In search of the miraculous', for which he sailed from Cape Cod towards Holland. He has never been seen since. The shipwreck of the tiny sailing boat he used was found on the coast of Ireland (although the latest information seems to prove it was found in Spain.) His disappearance makes his work tend to the sublime, and we thought the fact that he is disappearing on another level because of the disappering information on him. It got us thinking about the bodies of work that disappear simply because books get out of print, and catalogues on exhibitions are only made for the occasion of an exhibition, while they often carry vital information on artists for the future understanding of their work. We liked the idea of working with this vulnerable mass of information that can be easily forgotten or overlooked. It is not in any commercial interest to re-publish such works. We thought it could very well be a task of art.

 

Why did you choose Roberto Walsh for the first book edited under Missingbooks?
When we were working on the idea, the Dutch journalist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an extreme islam fundamentalist. It was the second political murder in our country, and it shook everyone. Holland was supposed to be a tolerant, openminded society. But through the murders we were shown that our country is in trouble, left-wing ideas are overthrown, which results in a harsh policy on asylum seekers, and social care is rapidly becoming easy for the rich and harder for the poor. There are reports that 10 % of Dutch people live under the minimum wage-level, which means practically that these people have a hard time to feed themselves. These developments cause a new political awareness among people that could get away with the thought that things would sort themselves, before. After the brutal attack on Theo van Gogh, it was decided that his latest film in which islamic issues were raised (he worked alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, attacking the low position of the woman in islamic countries) could not be shown at the major filmfestival in Rotterdam. We thought it outrageous that the filmmaker, who worked to create a political awareness, was pushed aside because of political reasons. He used fiction to tell the truth, as did Rodolfo Walsh. We saw that boundaries between fact and fiction and freedom of speech are becoming blurred once again society, and we recognised some of our own concerns in the massive fight that Walsh put up against authorities. Walsh was murdered on the 25th of March, 1977 after he posted an open letter of condemnation of the state corruption and terror under Videla and his 'Junta'. Rodolfo Walsh was not only a journalist but also an author of fiction. His more factual reporting of the political and social circumstances of his country was certainly not tolerated and in fact life threatening. Through the use of fiction, Walsh was able to avoid immediate censure and still describe reality. His last book was published in 1973, a year that fell between two dictatorships, and has after its first edition not been republished. We believe that 'Un oscura dia de justicia' forms an important and significant first publication in the (missingbooks) series. As a homage both to an individual's life and mentality. The fact that he is hardly known outside Argentina, and the way his work was made very hard by the goverment he gave resistance to, made him an interesting first subject for us.

I also fell in love with his style. His intelligence and subtility. And his very early and brilliant experiments with structure. In footnotes for example, where the footnotes form a parallel story to the main story. To my dismay I saw that a lot of what my untill-then-hero Paul Auster does, seems to have directly taken from Walsh's work. In Auster's book The Oracle Night he uses footnotes that function just like the ones in Rodolfo's story.

 

How did you get to know Rodolfo Walsh work?
Germaine Kruip was invited by Caludia Fontes co-founder of Trama to give a workshop and viewing of my perfomance work 'Point of View' Claudia Fontes an Carlota Beltrame invited her to Tucuman where she made this work in collaboboration with theTucumán artist Jorge Gutiérrez who is also the director of the theater group La Baulera. With these actors she realized the performance. The performance is about the blurry boundaries between reality and fiction and how 'While we are reading reality we are creating reality at the same time'. It points out that we, the viewers, are the real authors of the performance. In conversations about this theme with the actors she heard about Rodolfo Walsh for the first time. It made her very curious and when she returned to Holland searched of a book of his hand but couldn't find anything. The stories about him kept haunting her and when the whole idea of Missingbooks started he was the first author who we thought off.

 

Why the books are sold by pairs (english and spanish)?
We want to keep the original book intact, the facsimile is a hommage to the original. The translated book is the second book, that we see as a shadow-book.

 

How many books have you printed?
2000 pairs.

 

Any future books?
Certainly, we have to decide soon what our next step will be.

 

 

 

 

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