IN ORDER OF PAGES

Veronika Spierenburg’s In Order of Pages presents a compendium of the artist’s many hours of research and reading at the Sitterwerk Library. The Sitterwerk Art Library is part of a collection of enterprises including a foundry, material archive, studio and photography printer located in a narrow valley outside the city of St. Gallen. The library originated with the bequest of Daniel Rohner, a passionate collector of books, and has since grown. Today the library operates a very particular system: each book is fitted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag and is digitally tracked; as a result it has no fixed location on the shelves, but can circulate and still be found. This system was created in light of Rohner’s interest in the associative connections generated by chance, random meetings of books in a library. The RFID system and the ensuing movement of books enables spontaneous creativity in the finding and sharing of volumes and information, as users can generate collections of books and the different constellations in which each volume has appeared can also be tracked. Since 2010, Spierenburg has been a regular visitor to the Sitterwerk Library; in this time she has created her own inventory of it. She moved through the 25,000 volumes, taking each she encountered in her hands and scanning more than 3000 pages that corresponded to her interests. This publication reproduces a selection of about 450 of these copies made by Spierenburg in collaboration with graphic designer Simone Koller. Each page retains the pagination from its original source. Published by Kodoji Press (Baden).