Performances

Reanimation Library in Mar Mikhael with Andrew Beccone

Thursday, Sep 11, 2014
6:30pm -> 8:00pm
The VOLUME Project in Beirut

98 Weeks Project Space

Reanimation Library (Mar Mikhael branch) will be presented to the public on September 11, along with the performance, “An Incomplete Portrait of the Reanimation Library.”

The Reanimation Library is a small, independent presence library open to the public, based in Brooklyn, NY. It is a growing collection of approximately 2,000 books that have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties.

Since 2006 it has acted as the catalyst for a wide range of creative activity resulting in paintings, drawings, collage, prints, books, digital video, conceptual art, sound art, graphic design, fashion design, animations, songs, poems, short stories, plays, and critical essays. The library-as-artwork is defined in part by the accumulating body of material that is created in response to it - an evolving exoskeleton of images, words, sounds, and ideas.

The non-circulating collection is cataloged according to the Library of Congress Classification system and is accessible to the public at its physical location and to a wider audience through its online catalog and image collection.

For the entire duration of the VOLUME project, 98weeks Project Space will host a temporary branch of the Reanimation Library that will consist of entirely new books sourced from thrift shops, markets and book bazaars in Beirut. With local collaborators passages from the books will be selected to compose a collective reading comprised of found texts.

About the Artist
Andrew Beccone, an artist and librarian, is the founder and director of the Reanimation Library. He received his Masters in Information and Library Science from the Pratt Institute in 2005. In addition to coordinating the library’s ongoing New York-based activities, he has organized temporary branch libraries in cities both nationally and internationally, including Philadelphia, London, Chicago, Providence, RI, Joshua Tree, CA, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. The library has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Queens Museum. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

For more information, email:
volume.beirut@gmail.com