prière d’insérer (erratum slip)

2011, in situ intervention, interactive project, activation protocol, 600 prières d’insérer (sheets of paper 10 x 15 cm) placed inside 600 books

“Prière d’insérer” is a project involving an artistic intervention in situ which was first carried out at the Media Library Roger Gauthier in Noisy-le-Sec (France) in 2010 and secondly at the FLACSO Library in 2012 in the city of Quito (Ecuador). In cooperation with the staff of a given library, some thirty quotations are gathered from different books belonging to the institution. The quotations all refer to notions of displacement, travel, movement and change of perspective.

Each quotation is transcribed and printed twenty times onto small sheets of paper that take the shape of an erratum slip (a “prière d’insérer”). On the back, a brief text invites the reader to make the sheet of paper travel, displacing it from the inside of a book onto another from within the same library and always different from the book where the paper was found the first time. Like this, the 600 printed sheets will be moved indefinitely by the readers and will travel the pages of the different books available at the library for public consultation.