De Natura Libris

Photographic series "De Natura Libris" portrays the interactions we have with books: physical and abstract.

The corporeity of a book is recorded through its structures, textures, forms and signs of use.

Experiences are ultimately individual, evoked by any number of attributes: the content of a book, its textures and smells, the memories it awakens, or simply the aesthetic beauty of its parts.

By reading and using books, people create ties. As each journey through a book is personal, so is the interpretation of these photographs...

The project relies on the collaboration of different writers who wrote or shared texts taking the photographs as a starting point. Some authors are: Ana Blandiana, Orhan Pamuk, Joanna Kavenna, Jacqueline Woodson, Yann Martel, Javier Cercas,Ruth Padel, Salman Rushdie, Yan Lianke John Banville, Enrique Vila Matas, Roger Chartier, Cornelia Funke, Forrest Gander, Alberto Manguel and more.

Traveling through a book, writing a book - both are a mysterious adventure. I don’t understand how the internet works. But I know how it is with the book. There is a strange secret in writing an reading - it can, with the mere twenty-five letters of the Slovene alphabet or whatever number of letters are in the alphabet of any other language, express the multifariousness of human life, and poems and stories can reach amazing fantasy landscapes. In an era of the global internet, literary art goes on creating its universal worlds, worlds of a most profuse heterogeneity. A simple invention called the alphabet enables us to browse an infinitely more fascinating network than one based on silicon crystals. And we know that with its help and without hurtling technology it is possible to travel, yes even fly around an infinite internet — the internet of our imagination.

Drago Jančar

L’écriture et la lecture sont les seules technologies qui nous animent de l’intérieur et qui prolongent les dispositions de notre cerveau. C’est sans doute pourquoi lire et écrire sont si déchirant et enlevant. Le livre ouvre tout grand l’espace sur notre corps à corps avec la réalité et ce mystérieux envol du soi que sont la poésie et la fiction. Notre fiction d’espèce est un livre.

Nicole Brossard

Cuando sentí que mi vista empezaba a declinar, decidí leer a la luz natural, sea la del sol cambiante según las épocas del año, sea la del gris obstinado que puede velar el cielo y sin embargo ilumina mejor que cualquier auxilio.

Recientemente, reducido a un lecho de convalecencia, acepté encender una lámpara. Vi, con espanto y admiración, que la luz eléctrica, al posarse sobre la página, borraba la letra impresa y dejaba el papel blanco a la espera de lo que pudiese proyectar la mirada de un ávido lector.

Edgardo Cozarinsky

De Natura Libris

Gallery